Yuichiro Kakutani
Published on August 18, 2025 – 3:19 PM EDT – Key Points and Summary: The U.S.-China technology competition is being hindered by a lack of agreed-upon facts, leading to a fractured and ineffective policy debate.
-To solve this, Congress should mandate an annual “China Tech Power” report, mirroring the Pentagon’s influential “China Military Power” report.
-This unclassified document, supported by declassified intelligence, would provide a trusted, public baseline on China’s technological capabilities in areas like AI and semiconductors, the effectiveness of U.S. export controls, and the extent of Beijing’s military-civil fusion.
-Such a report is critical for aligning government and private sector strategies in this new Cold War.
The U.S. Needs A “China Tech Power Report”
The U.S.-China technology competition is heating up, but increasingly, policy discussions are playing out on a split screen. Take recent debates over technology export controls.
On one side, critics argue that export controls have failed to meaningfully delay Chinese tech development, pointing to impressive achievements of Chinese AI tools such as DeepSeek. On the other side, proponents claim that export controls have stalled Beijing’s progress in critical sectors and are essential for maintaining U.S. technological supremacy.
Vibrant debate on the U.S.-China tech competition is welcome. But sometimes it seems as though stakeholders are operating on completely different sets of facts.
For example, Jensen Hwang, CEO of U.S. technology firm NVIDIA, recently claimed that the Chinese military is not using chips produced by his company. Yet open-source researchers disagree, pointing to NVIDIA chips discovered in People’s Liberation Army (PLA) contracts.
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