The best hedge I know against heightening tensions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble.

When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income.

And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy. When the federal government offers, for example, rental support in housing-scarce cities, landlords can raise their prices, leaving renters no better off. When it increases financial aid for spiralling college tuition costs, universities are able to eat part of that by raising their tuition. Under banners like “abundance agenda,” “supply side progressivism,” and “progress studies,” various movements are trying to loosen American supply constraints. These are excellent ideas that I hope will be broadly adopted.

I spent years covering the twists and turns of these technology restrictions. The more it went on, the more it felt that the United States was committed to a strategy of destroying its scientific and industrial establishment— through prosecutions of scientists and cutting off the sales of chipmakers— in order to save it. Rather than realizing its own Sputnik moment, the United States triggered one in China.

China’s technology leaders have always bought American chips because they wanted to sell globally competitive products. They ignored Beijing’s beseeching to buy from domestic vendors for the simple reason that Chinese technologies were not good enough.

Sometimes I think that the United States’ tech competition with China— chaotic policymaking under Trump, porous implementation under Biden— has ended up in the worst of all worlds. These restrictions have scorched China’s most dynamic companies without killing them, which riles them up to break free of American restrictions.