When historians look back on the early 21st century, they may conclude that the United States taught China more by example than through lectures about trade practices or political systems.
In October, the Chinese leadership released its recommendations for the country’s 15th Five-Year Plan, which will cover 2026 to 2030. The document outlined not just where the leadership intends to steer the world’s second-largest economy, but also how it wants to project China’s power globally. Without explicitly mentioning the United States, Beijing’s political blueprint reveals the leadership’s intense focus on addressing technological chokepoints and its concerns about the extent of the country’s dependence on overseas suppliers for high-end technologies.
When historians look back on the early 21st century, they may conclude that the United States taught China more by example than through lectures about trade practices or political systems.
In October, the Chinese leadership released its recommendations for the country’s 15th Five-Year Plan, which will cover 2026 to 2030. The document outlined not just where the leadership intends to steer the world’s second-largest economy, but also how it wants to project China’s power globally. Without explicitly mentioning the United States, Beijing’s political blueprint reveals the leadership’s intense focus on addressing technological chokepoints and its concerns about the extent of the country’s dependence on overseas suppliers for high-end technologies.
For all Washington’s insistence that Beijing is an adversary, China’s approach to global power increasingly reflects three lessons that it learned from the United States: building economic resilience, weaponizing supply chains, and avoiding the quagmires of an overstretched superpower. The student may not share the teacher’s values, but China has certainly mastered the curriculum and adapted it to its own purposes.
China has taken the same lesson to heart, though through the lens of its own institutional memory. Its desire to control its technological future long predates the current tech competition with the United States. The trauma of the 1960s Sino-Soviet split—when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev abruptly cut off China’s access to critical civilian and military technologies—remains vivid among generations of senior Chinese Communist Party leaders. That episode, more than any contemporary dispute with Washington, cemented the belief that dependence is vulnerability.
In the mid-2010s, when Beijing’s ties with Washington had already become tense, Chinese leaders feared that the country’s heavy reliance on a high-tech supply chain from a small number of advanced economies might well become one of its most acute vulnerabilities.
As a result, the “Made in China 2025” initiative is among several crucial steps taken by the Chinese government in recent years to strengthen the country’s home-grown scientific innovation capacity. The introduction of its “dual circulation” strategy in May 2020 aimed to strengthen domestic supply chains while maintaining selective engagement with global markets. This is, at its core, a version of the United States’ own industrial policy, borne out of the recognition that a supply chain with too many foreign, outsourced links is a weak one.
But what differentiates China and the United States in this current technology competition is Beijing’s determination to marshal finance, manpower, and the administrative capability from the center by pooling all available national resources together to support home-grown technology breakthroughs.
To go further, Beijing’s overarching goal is to make China a global champion in innovation. The vision is of a nation that not only produces technology but defines its frontiers and global standards in areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
China’s perennial challenge is to strike a balance between prioritizing technological self-reliance while ensuring job creation and income growth for its younger generation. The focus on technological self-reliance implies a shift toward fewer, more specialized jobs, in contrast to the mass employment provided by the property sector and fintech conglomerates as in the past. Such a shift will exacerbate the high youth unemployment rate of 17.3 percent that was seen throughout 2025.
For decades, Washington wielded export controls as a strategic weapon. From the Cold War’s Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) to recent restrictions on advanced semiconductors, the United States has long believed that controlling critical technologies is essential to sustaining military and economic supremacy.
China has studied this playbook carefully and used its influence as the world’s biggest trading nation and its dominance of manufacturing supply chains to project its power in international affairs.
In the past decade, China has rolled out its own export control laws and “unreliable entity” lists. Restrictions on gallium, germanium, and graphite exports—all key to global semiconductor and battery supply chains—show that China is now willing to wield its own version of U.S.-style tech statecraft. When Washington weaponizes interdependence, Beijing responds with imitation and not high-octave outrage.
In this sense, Beijing has used control of critical minerals to gain leverage throughout tariff negotiations with Washington. And its export control regime is less an act of defiance and more of an acknowledgement of how great power operates. The United States taught China that exerting control over your opponent’s vulnerability is leverage, and leverage is influence. Beijing’s policies are not so much anti-American as they are grounded in the same logic of strategic advantage through control.
And its intended recipient is not just the United States. It is meant to serve as a signal to other countries on how much disruption China can equally inflict. This persuades other countries to think twice about aligning too closely with Washington.
China’s leaders understand that global power rests not on openness alone, but on the ability to close the gates when necessary. By building resilience in key sectors—energy, food, pharmaceutical, semiconductors, and shipping—Beijing is learning the same lesson that Washington mastered during the 20th century: A great power cannot afford to be at the mercy of another’s supply chain.
Perhaps the most profound lesson that China has learned from the United States is not what the latter has done—but what it has done poorly. From Vietnam, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, the United States has been drawn repeatedly into regional conflicts that it only partially understood, often with chaotic consequences. Beijing has long been a strong advocate of non-interference in foreign affairs and a frequent utilizer of diplomatic nonalignment, with notable exceptions of Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan.
China’s current foreign policy continues to show the imprint of reticence to some extent. Despite fiery rhetoric and military exercises around the Taiwan Strait, or the South China Sea, Beijing has been careful to avoid entanglement in wars that it cannot control. For example, in the Middle East, it maintains ties with both Iran and Saudi Arabia; it has studiously avoided becoming involved in major crises beyond its immediate periphery.
China’s restraint is not purely moral or pacifist—it is pragmatic. It has studied the United States’ past military interventions and concluded that a great power’s influence often erodes when it becomes trapped in local disputes. The United States taught China that it is better to arbitrate conflicts from afar than to fight them up close.
Yet China has limits as a security actor. Its activities in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea fuel mistrust and great unease among regional neighbors, undermining Beijing’s ambitions to be seen as a stabilizing force. It aspires to greater regional prominence to advance its diplomatic aims—such as the global initiatives for development, security, and governance—as the United States becomes less predictable and its influence wanes. But China also knows that embracing the role of global security manager would expose it to the same pitfalls that weakened U.S. power.
The irony of today’s U.S.-China rivalry is that much of what Washington finds threatening about Beijing’s behavior reflects its own earlier choices. The United States built its strength on industrial policy, technological control, global infrastructure investment, and calibrated engagement abroad. Now, China follows a similar path—through “Made in China 2025,” its proliferating global initiatives, and a diplomatic posture that mixes high-octane rhetoric with targeted economic coercion.
More than a decade ago, the United States wanted China to be a “responsible stakeholder.” But what it got instead was a mirror—a power that absorbed U.S. strategic logic, stripped it of its political facade, and applied it to its own rise.
If the United States wants to understand China’s trajectory, then it must first acknowledge its own reflection in Beijing’s actions. China is not an aberration and adversary to the system that the United States built, it is a consequence of it. The habits of great-power management are contagious.
For China, the United States’ greatest export was never democracy or consumer culture; it was the template for global power itself. And China, more than any other country, has studied it well—even as it now begins to write a version of the playbook that is uniquely its own.
