This piece originally appeared in American Affairs.
China’s rise has put America’s vanishing technological edge and decrepit industrial base in sharp focus. As the Chinese Communist Party relentlessly pursues technological breakthroughs and industrial dominance, a faction of elites in the United States has begun to coalesce around the objective of reversing America’s relative decline. Bringing together trade hawks, defense technologists, and policy experts working on topics from immigration to permitting reform, this new coalition fears that without serious government attention and action, America’s best days are in the past.
While still embracing private innovation, this techno-industrial coalition nonetheless realizes that the government must play a more active role in accelerating innovation and supporting industrial development. Yet the long-standing neglect of American technological strength stems from the fact that neither technological innovation nor industrial capacity have preoccupied America’s political culture for some time. This presents a significant hurdle as this coalition seeks to affect enduring changes in policy. Fortunately, history offers instructive models for overcoming such obstacles. The challenge before America’s techno-industrialists today resembles that confronted by generations of Chinese reformers as they reckoned with how far their country had fallen behind the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
No nation has more successfully inculcated these priorities into its political culture than China. From Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, Chinese leaders have consistently privileged technological innovation as the key determinant of national power.“Strengthening the nation through science and technology” (科技强国) has become one of Xi’s lynchpin slogans. State agencies regularly publish reports highlighting techno-industrial strength as the main driver of great nations’ rise and fall. The seriousness with which China treats technological progress has translated to many concrete achievements, including its world-class ability to build modern infrastructure, growing dominance in critical technologies, and a series of global firsts at the technological frontier.
