In Response To
Underestimating China
Why America Needs a New Strategy of Allied Scale to Offset Beijing’s Enduring Advantages
By Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi
Be China to Beat China?
Damien Ma and Lizzi C. Lee
U.S.-Chinese competition has long been framed as a contest between two countries with opposite roles in the global economy: China as the producer and the United States as the consumer. Now, however, each country is attempting to become more like the other in a race to rebalance its economy. Can the United States substitute for lost production from China faster than China can substitute for lost consumption from the United States?
In their thought-provoking article “Underestimating China” (May/June 2025), Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi argue that, to win this race, Washington needs to achieve sufficient scale by stitching together a network of allies. Assembling a Team America might solve the scale problem, but it will prove insufficient to compete with China’s industrial capacity and manufacturing might. The United States will also need to do the hard, often politically challenging work of digging up raw materials, building infrastructure, and deploying technology inside its own borders. In short, scale alone won’t be able to meet the challenge of amassing an integrated supply chain from mining and manufacturing to material science.
If the United States wants to become more like China, it will need not only to match Chinese scale but also to replicate aspects of how Beijing organizes and mobilizes its production economy, especially when it comes to speed and agglomeration. Think of it as an industrial policy with American characteristics. The United States must cut red tape, such as the lengthy reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, so that companies can build infrastructure faster, as they can in China. In 2023, Shanghai’s municipal government and local state-owned enterprises built an AI accelerator in Shanghai in just 38 days. The United States should also cluster industries to generate efficiencies and drive down costs. Here, the experience of Hefei, a Chinese city that has become a manufacturing center for electric vehicles—akin to a twenty-first-century Detroit—might be instructive.
Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi Reply
A rich debate about American renewal is underway, much of it focused on domestic affairs. Our article aimed to connect that domestic conversation to foreign policy. We agree that it is necessary for the United States to adopt an industrial policy to compete with China, but it is also insufficient. Allied scale is equally critical; it offers a path to competitiveness through pooled markets, two-way flows of technology and process knowledge, and a moat against China’s capacity to produce goods at low cost. Domestic production without allied scale is financially unsustainable; allied scale without domestic production is a bridge to nowhere. And success requires recognizing that the domestic politics of U.S. allies matter for the United States, too. We hope this thoughtful letter and our article together help advance a renewal agenda that integrates both domestic and foreign determinants of national competitiveness.
You are reading a free article
Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access.
- Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives
- Six issues a year in print and online, plus audio articles
- Unlock access to the Foreign Affairs app for reading on the go
Already a subscriber? Sign In
.jpg.webp?itok=yCn6NMsG)