Opinion
Guest Essay
In the
Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.
May 19, 2025
By Kyle Chan
Mr. Chan is
a researcher at Princeton University who focuses on Chinese industrial policy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/opinion/china-us-trade-tariffs.html?searchResultPosition=1
For years,
theorists have posited the onset of a “Chinese century”: a world in which China
finally harnesses its vast economic and technological potential to surpass the
United States and reorient global power around a pole that runs through
Beijing.
That century
may already have dawned, and when historians look back they may very well
pinpoint the early months of President Trump’s second term as the watershed
moment when China pulled away and left the United States behind.
It doesn’t
matter that Washington and Beijing have reached an inconclusive and temporary
truce in Mr. Trump’s trade war. The U.S. president immediately claimed it as a
win, but that only underlines the fundamental problem for the Trump
administration and America: a shortsighted focus on inconsequential skirmishes
as the larger war with China is being decisively lost.
Mr. Trump is
taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation. His
tariffs are endangering U.S. companies’ access to global markets and supply
chains. He is slashing public research funding and gutting our universities,
pushing talented researchers to consider leaving for other countries. He wants
to roll back programs for technologies like clean energy and semiconductor
manufacturing and is wiping out American soft power in large swaths of the
globe.
China’s
trajectory couldn’t be more different.
It already
leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding,
batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment,
consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It
is projected to account for 45 percent — nearly half — of global manufacturing
by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future: In March it
announced a $138 billion national venture capital fund that will make long-term
investments in cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and
robotics, and increased its budget for public research and development.
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The results
of China’s approach have been stunning.
When the
Chinese start-up DeepSeek launched its artificial intelligence chatbot in
January, many Americans suddenly realized that China could compete in A.I. But
there have been a series of Sputnik moments like that.
The Chinese
electric carmaker BYD, which Mr. Trump’s political ally Elon Musk once laughed
off as a joke, overtook Tesla last year in global sales, is building new
factories around the world and in March reached a market value greater than
that of Ford, GM and Volkswagen combined. China is charging ahead in drug
discoveries, especially cancer treatments, and installed more industrial robots
in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. In semiconductors, the vital
commodity of this century and a longtime weak point for China, it is building a
self-reliant supply chain led by recent breakthroughs by Huawei. Critically,
Chinese strength across these and other overlapping technologies is creating a
virtuous cycle in which advances in multiple interlocking sectors reinforce and
elevate one another.
Yet Mr.
Trump remains fixated on tariffs. He doesn’t even seem to grasp the scale of
the threat posed by China. Before the two countries’ announcement last Monday
that they had agreed to slash trade tariffs, Mr. Trump dismissed concerns that
his previous sky-high tariffs on Chinese goods would leave shelves empty in
American stores. He said Americans could just get by with buying fewer dolls
for their children — a characterization of China as a factory for toys and
other cheap junk that is wildly out of date.
The United
States needs to realize that neither tariffs nor other trade pressure will get
China to abandon the state-driven economic playbook that has worked so well for
it and suddenly adopt industrial and trade policies that Americans consider
fair. If anything, Beijing is doubling down on its state-led approach, bringing
a Manhattan Project-style focus to achieving dominance in high-tech industries.
China faces
its own serious challenges. A prolonged real estate slump continues to drag on
economic growth, though there are signs that the sector may be finally
recovering. Longer-term challenges also loom, such as a shrinking work force
and an aging population. But skeptics have been predicting China’s peak and
inevitable fall for years, only to be proved wrong each time. The enduring
strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and
redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now
undeniable, regardless of whether free-market advocates like it.
Mr. Trump’s
blinkered obsession with short-term Band-Aids like tariffs, while actively
undermining what makes America strong, will only hasten the onset of a
Chinese-dominated world.
If each
nation’s current trajectory holds, China will likely end up completely
dominating high-end manufacturing, from cars and chips to M.R.I. machines and
commercial jets. The battle for A.I. supremacy will be fought not between the
United States and China but between high-tech Chinese cities like Shenzhen and
Hangzhou. Chinese factories around the world will reconfigure supply chains
with China at the center, as the world’s pre-eminent technological and economic
superpower.
America, by
contrast, may end up as a profoundly diminished nation. Sheltered behind tariff
walls, its companies will sell almost exclusively to domestic consumers. The
loss of international sales will degrade corporate earnings, leaving companies
with less money to invest in their businesses. American consumers will be stuck
with U.S.-made goods that are of middling quality but more expensive than
global products, owing to higher U.S. manufacturing costs. Working families
will face rising inflation and stagnant incomes. Traditional high-value
industries such as car manufacturing and pharmaceuticals are already being lost
to China; the important industries of the future will follow. Imagine Detroit
or Cleveland on a national scale.
Avoiding
that grim scenario means making policy choices — today — that should be obvious
and already have bipartisan support: investing in research and development;
supporting academic, scientific and corporate innovation; forging economic ties
with countries around the world; and creating a welcoming and attractive
climate for international talent and capital. Yet the Trump administration is
doing the opposite in each of those areas.
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