My Take | Steadfast state support is key to China winning tech race with US
America is shooting itself in the foot by defunding basic research and manpower under the Trump White House
Several salient features in this race for supremacy have been identified: China’s highly focused state support of science and tech, America’s federal defunding of them, and a nation of engineers and science graduates versus a nation of lawyers.
“China is an engineering state … facing off against the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad,” wrote Dan Wang in Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
The US may have a qualitative advantage in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), but China is well ahead quantitatively. In 2016, China already had 4.7 million STEM graduates, compared with 2.6 million in India and 568,000 in the US. In 2022, China graduated over 50,000 PhDs in STEM, while the US had 34,000.
China’s industrial policy has been consistent, long-standing and expanding. It is able to support and scale up a winning tech field and the firms in it to compensate for other bad choices.
Lizzi Lee, an Asia Society Policy Institute fellow, told Bloomberg that the Chinese system is “showing a very different – yet perhaps also viable, or even more feasible – model of development”.