Four Perspectives for Leaders Navigating U.S.-China Technology Competition
For boards, heads of strategy and general counsels managing U.S.-China technology competition, the open questions are what to localize, what to decouple and what a Chinese technology stack that no longer needs Western inputs means for a five-year capital plan. September’s summit in Washington extended the trade truce by two months and left those questions unsettled.
Key Takeaways
- China produces at least 70% of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar cells, according to The New Yorker, the industrial base behind Dan Wang’s “engineering state” framework.
- Julian Gewirtz and Matt Sheehan propose U.S.-China technical exchanges on AI safety testing and a crisis-communication channel that do not depend on trust.
- Meg Rithmire and Peter Cowhey argue that the United States should set strategic terms for Chinese investment, as China did for Western firms for decades.
- Jonas Nahm argues that the EU’s slow, rule-bound trade process has become an asset as partners seek durable terms amid U.S. volatility.
Dan Wang: Why China Builds While America Debates
Evan Osnos’s Aug. 10 feature in The New Yorker, “The Future, Made in China,” cites the framework of Dan Wang, a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University, whose book Breakneck contrasts China’s “engineering state” with America’s “lawyerly society” and shows how these opposite approaches have led the two countries down different paths in technology, infrastructure and manufacturing. Wang spent six years on the ground in China. Osnos’s feature reports that China produces at least 70% of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar cells; it deploys more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined; in medicine, it has surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials; its shipbuilding capacity is roughly 200 times that of the U.S.
Wang’s thesis is that China’s “engineering state” focuses on building at speed, while America’s “lawyerly society” is built for debate. China can produce “strong outcomes in science and technology,” he told Osnos, but its internal problems are profound. “Shanghai is pretty amazing. It may even be one of the top-three great cities of the world. But how can China be a great civilization if almost no one wants to have kids?”
Julian Gewirtz: How to Pursue AI Safety Without Trust
Julian Gewirtz, a senior research scholar at the Columbia Institute of Global Politics, and Matt Sheehan published “How to Make the U.S.-China AI Race Less Dangerous” in TIME on Sept. 18, days before the summit, arguing that the two countries should pursue AI safety in parallel and demonstrate their progress in practice, anchored in technical exchanges that make each country’s AI systems safer on their own terms. “The two countries need to lay the basic groundwork” for handling incidents such as an American AI model escaping its company’s control and hacking Chinese networks, or a Chinese AI-powered drone attacking a U.S. Navy vessel when neither side can determine whether the incident was accidental or deliberate, they write.\
The authors propose technical exchanges on how to test models for dangerous capabilities and behaviors that neither country wants released, including AI systems capable of helping amateurs develop bioweapons or evading human oversight and control. “These proposed technical exchanges would not depend on ‘trust’ or even strict ‘reciprocity’ between the two superpowers, nor would they require identical conceptions of AI risk,” they write. “They would be driven by self-interest.”
Gewirtz led the White House team coordinating U.S. policy on China during the Biden administration. On Sept. 25, he told NPR’s “All Things Considered” that there is “a version of diplomacy with China that could be used quite effectively to lower tensions and buy time, but everything depends on what the United States does with the time it buys.”
Meg Rithmire: Why Keeping Chinese Investment Out Costs the U.S.
Meg Rithmire, the James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Peter Cowhey argue in “The Cost of Keeping China Out,” published in Foreign Affairs on Aug. 17, that blanket barriers to Chinese investment hurt American competitiveness and that the United States can set strategic terms for Chinese investment, using the regulatory tools it already has. “There is a clear precedent for this strategy. It is, in fact, exactly what China did to Western companies for decades,” they write.
Approvals by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States for sensitive investments already frequently involve national security agreements, which govern cybersecurity, data management and board-level monitoring. Rithmire and Cowhey argue that those agreements “could also mandate that companies with Chinese investment have special corporate governance boards that monitor and execute economic requirements, including workforce training, diversification of suppliers, technology transfers, and more.” “Chinese firms are no longer merely efficient producers or copycats; in terms of knowledge and production capability, they are increasingly global leaders in many industries. Denying them access to the American market harms U.S. competitiveness, hinders U.S. efforts to build industrial capacity at home, and ensures that U.S. industry and consumers remain far from the frontier of technological advancement,” they write.
In a Sept. 25 interview with Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, “As the US Runs the AI Race, China Plays a Different Game,” Rithmire argues that China is focused on embedding AI throughout its economy while the United States fixates on a “frontier-first” approach. “The US is pouring massive amounts of capital into the tech companies that are developing LLMs, with the idea that they need massive investments to train on more data to get better,” she explains. “China thinks of AI as a factor of production. Chinese models are super low-cost, and they’re OK in intelligence. Most of the world doesn’t need the most advanced model of all time to run their HR department or optimize their factory floor.”
Jonas Nahm: Why Europe’s Slow Trade Process Is an Advantage
In “Europe’s Hidden Trade Advantage,” published in Foreign Affairs on Sept. 14, Jonas Nahm, the Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, argues that the EU’s bureaucratic process and institutional lethargy are proving to be assets as the volatility of U.S. trade policy pushes trading partners to look for durable terms elsewhere. When the Supreme Court ruled the administration’s tariffs unlawful in February, they were replaced under a different statutory authority, and countries that had offered concessions found themselves no more certain of the terms than before. “The volatility that was supposed to generate leverage became instead a permanent condition, undermining the U.S. position,” Nahm writes. The U.S. goods trade deficit reached a record $1.24 trillion in 2025.
Since September 2025, the EU has concluded trade agreements with Indonesia, India, the South American bloc Mercosur and Australia. Each must clear negotiation by the European Commission, approval by a qualified majority of member states and the European Parliament’s consent, and new defensive tariffs require a formal investigation. “The constraints that frustrate European governments when they want to act quickly are the same constraints that make European commitments durable,” Nahm writes. “No election can reverse them. No executive order can impose new terms overnight.” A future U.S. administration that chooses to engage with this network of agreements “would be doing so on terms it did not write.”
How Leadership Teams Can Plan in a Two-System Economy
For a board, a head of strategy or a general counsel’s office, the work now is positioning the organization in a global economy shaped by both systems. The frameworks these five thinkers supply are the evidence leadership teams are working through: the engineering state versus the lawyerly society, AI safety without trust, strategic terms for investment, Europe’s bureaucratic advantage and the quantum supply chain.
Dan Wang, Meg Rithmire, Julian Gewirtz, and Jonas Nahm are each exclusively represented by Stellant Group for speaking engagements including keynotes, fireside chats and panel discussions with leadership teams thinking through U.S.-China technology competition, industrial policy and the investment and supply chain decisions that follow. For our consulting or advisory offerings, please reach out through stellantgroup.com for a custom proposal.
