- China’s sprawling manufacturing base, state investment, and control over critical supply chains give Beijing systemic advantages in advanced batteries, commercial drones, advanced manufacturing, and advanced wireless network infrastructure.
- The United States maintains important leadership in artificial intelligence, quantum, fusion energy, semiconductors, internet platforms, and synthetic biology, but the report repeatedly characterizes those leads as contested or narrowing.
- The report’s technology-list survey finds U.S. non-government stakeholders placing greater emphasis on artificial intelligence, fintech, software, enterprise technologies, and health data than government actors.
- U.S. government technology priorities, as described in the surveyed lists, remain concentrated on artificial intelligence, advanced computing, advanced networks, and advanced manufacturing.
- Across biopharmaceuticals and synthetic biology, the report says U.S. research and early-stage innovation strengths are weakened by commercialization, production, and biomanufacturing capacity gaps.
This report provides a comparative assessment of U.S. and Chinese technological competitiveness for policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers. The analysis updates SCSP’s earlier gaps work and combines qualitative and quantitative indicators, including fielded capabilities, technology-list surveys, investment patterns, publication trends, supply-chain evidence, and sector-specific assessments. It reviews how U.S. government, private-sector, allied, and Chinese stakeholders prioritize critical technologies, then evaluates competitive positions across advanced batteries, advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, biopharmaceuticals, commercial drones, advanced wireless networks, fusion energy, internet platforms, non-terrestrial networks, quantum, semiconductors, and synthetic biology. The report argues that China’s manufacturing base, state financing, commercialization capacity, and supply-chain leverage create advantages in infrastructure-heavy and production-intensive domains. It also finds that the United States retains important strengths in private-sector innovation, foundational research, leading technology firms, international collaboration, and several emerging technology ecosystems. Across many areas, however, the report describes narrowing gaps, contested trajectories, and vulnerabilities tied to dependence on foreign production, standards-setting battles, permitting, regulatory constraints, and commercialization bottlenecks. Its policy relevance lies in providing a diagnostic resource for technology competition strategy, highlighting where U.S. leaders may need to reinforce domestic capacity, coordinate with allies and partners, secure critical supply chains, and anticipate geopolitical wildcards.
The intensifying technological competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China represents one of the most consequential dynamics shaping the 21st century.
SCSP
Published by the Special Competitive Studies Project. Co-publishers and external authors, where they exist, are credited in the byline above.