As we sipped tea in his office after our tour, we chatted about why the United States was then mired in production difficulties, unable to make much of the personal protective equipment that people wanted. “American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.

The United States must regain, at a minimum, the manufacturing capacity to scale up production that emerges from its own industrial labs. If it does not, continuing to value scientific breakthroughs rather than mass manufacturing, then it might lose whole industries once more— as it did by inventing the solar photovoltaic panel but relying on China to produce them. The United States likes to celebrate the light-bulb moment of genius innovators. But there is, I submit, more glory in having big firms making a product rather than a science lab claiming its invention.

Xi’s reining in of tech giants are not altogether different from what a lot of American and European regulators wish to do to Silicon Valley. Every government in the world is grappling with companies that have too much influence over the flow of information and commerce. Individually, China’s regulations around antitrust, data protection, or financial risks may pass muster on technocratic grounds. But Beijing issued regulations with a speed and ferocity that no other state can match. It did so for reasons that the West would not: to shift investment and talent into state-prioritized industries and to crush the power that these companies were gaining at the expense of the state.

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.

As relations between the United States and China become more hostile, the chances of conflict grow. The United States is facing a peer competitor that has four times its population, an economy with considerable dynamic potential, and a manufacturing sector that can substantially counter produce itself and its allies. If China and the United States ever come to blows, they would be entering a conflagration with different strengths. Which would you rather have: software or hardware?