“If I could only open one thing each morning it would be John Ellis’s News Items newsletter.” — Larry Summers, President Emeritus of Harvard University and former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.
Since Donald Trump hit Xi Jinping’s government with punitive tariffs in 2018, his push to cut the trade deficit has snowballed into a full-scale bipartisan effort to stop China from becoming the world’s biggest economy and obtaining technology that threatens American military superiority.
At a glance, the campaign appears successful. China’s economy is no longer on pace to overtake the US and is actually falling further behind. Its tech giants face difficulty obtaining advanced chips to develop artificial intelligence. And US allies are complying with requests to deny China access to the best chip-making equipment, including one-of-a-kind machines from Netherlands-based ASML Holding NV.
But despite more than six years of US tariffs, export controls and financial sanctions, Xi is making steady progress in positioning China to dominate industries of the future. New research by Bloomberg Economics and Bloomberg Intelligence shows that Made in China 2025 — an industrial policy blueprint unveiled a decade ago to make the nation a leader in emerging technologies — has largely been a success. Of 13 key technologies tracked by Bloomberg researchers, China has achieved a global leadership position in five of them and is catching up fast in seven others.
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