A Chinese citizen born when the country completed its first expressway would— by the time she reached the legal driving age of eighteen in 2011– be able to drive on a highway system that surpassed the length of the US interstate system. By 2020, China had built a second batch of expressways that again totaled the length of the US system. The first expanse of highways took eighteen years to build; the second took half that time.

Cars quickly filled these roads. In 1990, there were half a million automobiles in the country; in 2024, there were 435 million, many of them electric. China didn’t just build cars and highways. It also built mass transit. From 2003 to 2013, Shanghai added as much subway track as the entire system in New York City. In 2025, fifty-one Chinese cities have subway lines, eleven of which are longer than New York’s. China now has a longer high-speed rail network than the rest of the work put together, ten times the length of Spain’s and Japan’s (second and third in the world, respectively). Sleek railcars in silver zooming on elevated bridges are telegenic things, their pictures adorning billboards and book covers. This system completes around two billion passenger trips each year.

Beijing wanted especially for manufacturers to maintain operation. While the rest of the world was having trouble producing stuff— masks and cotton swabs, electronics for remote work— and while foreign consumers had stimulus money to spend, Chinese factories were positioned to meet the world’s demand.

For a while, that scheme worked. China’s trade surplus hit a record high in 2021, and then again in 2022, approaching almost a trillion dollars. In spite of the tariffs that Donald Trump imposed on gigantic categories of Chinese-made goods, the United States and China experienced record trade in 2022.

Many other wealthy Chinese have decided to settle elsewhere for good. Hard numbers are difficult to work out, but one UK-based emigration firm estimated that nearly 14,000 millionaires emigrated from China in 2023 and over 15,000 in 2024.

Germany and Japan are mighty exporters with, respectively, eight million and ten million manufacturing workers. A country doesn’t need so many people to have a robust semiconductor industry: A few hundred thousand highly trained workers are enough. In 2025, China will graduate more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields as the United States— and many in American universities are Chinese nationals likely to repatriate.

The quantitative disparities between the United States and China are stark. In 2022, China had nearly 1,800 ships under construction, and the United States had 5. US support of Ukraine against Russian aggression also exposed the paltry state of its domestic munition capacity. In two days, Ukraine could fire as many shells as the United States makes in a month. At the very end of the Biden administration, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said bluntly that the United States will experience “exhaustion of munition stockpiles very rapidly” if it were ever to face the Chinese military.