The Future, Made in China

Kai-Fu Lee, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company 01.AI, lives in a mirrored high-rise in Beijing, near a procession of landmarks that emperors considered the center of the cosmos. Lee takes early meetings at a nearby hotel that could be in any country, except that the room service is delivered by robots painted in the livery of butlers and maids. State propaganda hails these robots as emblems of China’s ascent; in the hallway, most people sidestep them with the kind of indifference usually reserved for a Roomba.Over breakfast one recent morning, Lee, wearing a white polo shirt and rimless glasses, spoke about the future with an air of sanguine curiosity. He was born in Taiwan in 1961 and built his career by following the moving frontier of opportunity. He got a degree in computer science from Columbia in the eighties and went on to Carnegie Mellon to study the fledgling field of A.I.—which he described back then as a “most promising science” that would be “men’s final step to understand themselves.” He ran speech recognition at Apple, and in 1992 appeared on “Good Morning America” to show off a prototype computer that used voice commands to record the news on a VCR. (The host, Joan Lunden, marvelled, “It’s almost going to be like a friend.”) During a stint at Microsoft, he recalls, he urged Bill Gates to buy an ambitious startup called Google, but Gates declined. Lee later became the head of Google in China.Lee moved to investing in 2009, and planned to focus on both China and the United States, but eventually he closed his American office. “It’s two different universes now,” he told me. The countries have diverged not only over such long-standing issues as trade, Taiwan, human rights, and espionage but also, increasingly, over the politics of technology. As Lee has noted, the Obama Administration released the federal government’s first major plan for the A.I. age in 2016, but it barely registered: it came out a few days after the “Access Hollywood” tape detonated in the Presidential campaign. When Donald Trump took office, he scrapped the plan and entrusted A.I. strategy largely to Silicon Valley. When China’s government issued its own A.I. plan, soon afterward, it was dense with turgid Communist Party jargon, but it also laid out a vast industrial policy, covering applications ranging from agriculture to policing, that promised “major breakthroughs” by 2025 and “world leading” status by 2030. Lee called it an “all-hands-on-deck approach to national innovation.”For a long time, China looked west for visions of the future. These days, it favors its own. The Chinese car company BYD recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. A popular clip shows Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, being asked in 2011 about competition from BYD, which was then known mainly for a boxy, undersized sedan; Musk laughed and said, “Have you seen their car?” Fifteen years later, China has more than a hundred automakers, competing for customers with such extravagant features as in-car karaoke, mechanical foot massagers, and video headlights that can project drive-in movies.Lee, whose social-media posts have attracted more than fifty million followers, has a striking forecast for the two countries in which he has prospered. In his book “AI Superpowers,” published in 2018, he predicts a “new world order” with “waves of technology that will soon wash over the global economy and tilt the geopolitical landscape toward China.” That kind of prophecy suits the official mood in Beijing, where Xi Jinping, the President and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, calls technology the “main battlefield of international competition” and bluntly asserts that “the East is rising, and the West is declining.”In July, the Chinese firm Moonshot released an A.I. model that performed comparably to its American competitors, at a fraction of the cost. Microchip stocks plunged, on fears that China will dominate A.I., much as it now dominates hardware. China produces at least seventy per cent 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, and, in medicine, it has surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials. Its shipbuilding capacity is roughly two hundred times that of the U.S., and some observers in Washington worry that American stockpiles of munitions would not match China’s in a war over Taiwan.Both countries are uneasily preoccupied with their trajectory these days. While the U.S. worries about whether it can continue a century of dominance, China is eager to restore its historical eminence, after two hundred years of what the Party sees as anomalous poverty. Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who is now a fellow at Tsinghua University, told me, “Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles.” But Americans, in his view, have lost that historical awareness. “They have been so strong for so long that every American believes, ‘I’m a member of the strongest nation on earth,’ ” he said. The Chinese are no less convinced of their ascendancy. A European diplomat who has attended meetings with Xi and his advisers told me, “They’re feeling like the champions of the world. They think they can contend with anybody.”A decade ago, few people in Beijing would have predicted that China would challenge the U.S. anytime soon. China’s decades-long economic boom was slowing, and the government’s choke hold on free thought was sending ambitious people abroad. In those days, an American in China who raised the merits of the two countries was likely to have a catechistic exchange. You’d note that China was growing powerful. Your acquaintance would reply, “Not as powerful as America.”The Chinese establishment has abandoned that view in stages. When Brexit was approved, in 2016, the West seemed to be turning inward. The fight over COVID-19 vaccines provided a signal that the U.S. was splintering; the storming of the Capitol offered another. After Trump returned to the White House, his Administration declared, “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” His aide Stephen Miller spoke instead of an international order “governed by force,” adding, “These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”In Beijing, a think tank at Renmin University recently published an assessment titled “Thank Trump,” which wryly hailed his efforts to hasten the “twilight of an empire,” by undermining America’s alliances, civil service, scientific institutions, and democratic credibility. In the past two years, the international approval rating of the U.S. has dropped nearly forty points, according to a worldwide survey by the Alliance of Democracies; in multiple polls, China now rates higher than the U.S.For China, America’s retreat comes just as decades of state investment, industrial policy, and diplomatic planning are paying off. It would be foolhardy to entirely trust China’s official statistics; as the economist Gao Shanwen once told an audience in D.C., the official growth rate “will always be around five per cent.” But the change is plainly visible. In two decades, China has gone from producing about half as much electricity as the U.S. to generating more than twice as much, at far lower prices; in 2023, it installed more solar power than America has installed in its entire history. Meanwhile, Trump reëmbraced fossil fuels, in what the historian Timothy Snyder called “superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form.”Trump has promised for years that he would stop China from “raping our country” through unfair trade practices. On “Liberation Day,” in April, 2025, he unveiled a program of sweeping tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicted that Beijing would quickly submit, saying that his counterparts were “playing with a pair of twos.” Instead, China retaliated by restricting exports of rare earths and high-powered magnets. Within weeks, Ford was forced to suspend production of Explorers at its plant in Chicago, and automakers were pleading for a deal. Since then, China has not only retained its position as the world’s largest trading nation; it also achieved a record trade surplus of $1.2 trillion, as it redirected its exports away from the U.S. In 2001, four out of five countries traded more with America than with China. By 2023, the map had reversed: seven in ten trade more with China.For the moment, China’s rulers have avoided overtly antagonizing America, because they believe that, even in decline, it remains uniquely dangerous. After Trump’s interventions in Venezuela and Iran, and his threats to Canada and Greenland, the Beijing Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, wrote that the U.S. was “dragging the world back to a dark age of plunder and division through superior military might.” But that bluster obscures a colder calculation: Chinese leaders believe that Trump’s struggle to dominate the world is actually aiding China.“The cookies are mediocre, but they have the longest line in the city.”Cartoon by Juan AstasioRush Doshi, a professor at Georgetown and a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees in Trump’s pursuit of territorial control a recurring historical error. In the eighteenth century, while Russia fixated on conquering Eurasia, Britain developed the steam engine; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Europeans fought over Africa, Americans mastered the assembly line. Today, while the U.S. tries to govern Venezuela and hobble Iran and Cuba, “China is focussed on winning the technologies of the future,” Doshi said. If the U.S. were to lose the competition over the next wave of industries—including A.I., biotech, and robotics—as it lost the ones over solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, “it would irreversibly change the balance of power.”What