China is rapidly expanding AI infrastructure and scaling projects faster than the U.S., aiming to seize the economic lead from first-to-scale AI use.
In her December 2025 New Year address, Huawei Rotating Chairwoman Meng Wanzhou (Sabrina Meng) reviewed the company’s major achievements in 2025 and outlined seven primary arenas for development in 2026. The speech signaled a clear strategic shift from broad-based technological expansion toward focused ecosystem building and a more explicit role as an industrial enabler. This … Read more
In High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (2024), Angela Huyue Zhang examines China’s regulatory approach, comparing it with developments in the United States and the European Union. She argues that, despite differences in political and economic structures, China faces regulatory challenges similar to those confronting Western systems. Zhang frames this … Read more
Engineering capability—the ability to transform theoretical and technological innovations into practical products—has long been a cornerstone of national competitiveness. The United States, once a global leader in this domain, has experienced a gradual decline due to a complex interplay of factors: overdevelopment of the service and financial sectors leading to industrial hollowing out, globalization and … Read more
Western misconceptions do more than distort how the United States interprets China’s economic system; they structurally constrain America’s ability to learn from China’s industrial policy experience. By framing China’s approach through ideological caricatures rather than analytical assessment, U.S. policymakers often dismiss outcomes that warrant serious study. This misperception is not merely rhetorical—it shapes the boundaries … Read more
In High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (2024), Angela Zhang argues that interpreting China’s regulation of Big Tech primarily through the lens of state repression is a fundamental misreading. While repression is not absent, overemphasizing it obscures other explanatory forces that are central to understanding how China’s technology sector has … Read more
In Powerful, Different, Equal, Peter B. Walker argues that Western understandings of China are constrained by a binary, dualistic mindset that classifies political systems as either “good” (democratic and individualistic) or “bad” (authoritarian and collectivist), obscuring the complexity of China’s historical and institutional development. This intellectual framing, Walker suggests, is less an objective analysis than … Read more
A recent Bloomberg article, “Give Up on ‘Winning’ Against China” (16 Dec 2025), argues that the United States should acknowledge China’s growing influence rather than cling to the hope of its decline. Over the past three decades, Western misconceptions—rooted in orientalist thinking, Cold War binaries, and ideological assumptions—led many scholars to view China as a … Read more
In Finance and the Real Economy: China and the West Since the Asian Financial Crisis (2020), Peter Nolan argues that China’s post-2008 development trajectory was shaped by a distinctive framework of state-led finance, infrastructure-led growth, and long-term industrial strategy. In response to the global financial crisis, China launched a coordinated wave of investment in “new … Read more
Since the Asian Financial Crisis, China and Western economies have followed sharply diverging paths in the relationship between finance and the real economy. As Peter Nolan argues in Finance and the Real Economy: China and the West Since the Asian Financial Crisis (2020), China has consistently deployed finance to support infrastructure, production, employment, and productivity, … Read more
The United States currently leads in frontier AI research and innovation, yet it faces persistent challenges in system-level deployment and large-scale integration. These constraints stem not from technological limitations but from structural factors, including decades of manufacturing hollowing, fragmented governance, and weak coordination across public and private actors. As a result, the U.S. often lacks … Read more