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.

The engineering state still has many strengths. There is one thing I haven’t changed my mind about since 2017: I remain more confident than ever that China will become a technological leader in manufacturing industries.

Marxists like to reason through contradictions. What is the central contradiction facing China? I submit that we must reconcile two realities when we read the headlines. First, the rich, the creative, and the desperate have chosen to rùn from the economic and political gloom that pervades Xi’s third term. Second, the manufacturing sector continues to go from strength to strength in the mastery of electric vehicles, clean technology, and other advanced technologies.

How might they be reconciled? With the idea of the engineering state.

Even if the United States is able to outclass China in diplomacy, finance, and innovation, the contest between these two great powers is going to be close if the United States can't build anything in the physical world.

The strongest wind in China’s sails is the entrenched technological workforce that preserves process knowledge that I wrote about in Chapter 3 on tech power. Though 50 percent of China’s economy might be dysfunctional, 5 percent is doing superbly well (an approximation I borrow from Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal).

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.