How advanced is China technologically compared to the U.S.? Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, says that China has pulled ahead of the U.S. in numerous industries of the future including robotics, electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energy due to strategic industrial policy and investment in STEM education, which have grown its ability to innovate.
Kyle Chan is a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center and an expert in China’s high-tech industries and U.S.-China competition.
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How technologically advanced is China compared to the U.S.? With Kyle Chan
Welcome to China 101, your introduction to Chinese affairs. I'm Tara Wu. Join me in making sense of China from the ground up, no background required.
Each episode, we'll tackle questions people are curious about and talk through them with China experts. And we'll explore the what's, why's, and how's of Chinese politics and society in the process. We'll go beyond what makes the news and move toward a fuller picture of one of the world's most influential countries.
Today, we explore the question, how advanced is China technologically? Our guest is Dr. Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center, who specializes in China's high-tech industries and U.S.-China competition. He explains that China has been gaining the lead over the U.S. in key industries ranging from AI and drones to renewable energy, thanks to decades of strategic industrial policy decisions. To believe that they aren't capable of innovating, he says, is an oversight that may cost the U.S. in the long run.
What you just heard was the sound of a robot socking another one in the head. This was at a kickboxing match held earlier this year at the world's first humanoid robot games in China. Due to the protective policies keeping out most Chinese tech companies from competing in the U.S., most of us aren't really exposed to what are really big names outside of the U.S., like BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle giant, or Unitree, a Chinese robotics firm. But you may have encountered videos of China's humanoid robots on your feeds.
I can tell you my social media feed is full of these dancing robots, robots doing backflips, doing all sorts of things, people questioning whether it's CGI or real. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely made a splash. And one useful thing is I do think it does showcase some of the advancements in robotics happening right now in China.
They've been a source of many a meme on the internet, but also serve as an indicator of China's advancement in key technologies of the future. Dr. Chan published a wake-up call in the New York Times in May of this year that details the extent of China's dominance in high-tech industries and why it should incentivize the U.S. to invest more in its own technological capabilities, or risk falling behind.
He writes, China is charging ahead in drug discoveries, especially cancer treatments, and installed more industrial robots in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. Critically, Chinese strength across these and other overlapping technologies is creating a virtuous cycle in which advances in multiple interlocking sectors reinforce and elevate one another. Can you tell us what you mean by a virtuous cycle? And then can you expand on the significance of these metrics? What do they say about Chinese leadership in technology across the board?
Yeah, so BYD has become sort of the symbol of China's prowess in electric vehicles. So they have megawatt charging capabilities where you can charge a car in a matter of minutes. They have now set the fastest land speed record for their sort of high-end Ferrari competitor. They also have cars that are so cheap, they're like in the range of $10,000 or $11,000 U.S. And the technology is pretty impressive. And I think that they kind of symbolize a lot of advancements in not just the EV industry, but sort of across a whole range of tech sectors.
So, you know, we're talking about robots earlier. Unitree is one example of that. We're talking about batteries. BYD and CATL are some of the leaders. You can go across the different sectors and see that actually China's making a lot of progress, especially in clean tech, for example, solar, wind, and obviously EVs.
One thing that I did notice is that it's not just sector by sector, that these sectors all are sort of mutually overlapping. They're all interlinked. So developing EVs means you need to have very strong battery capabilities. And having really good batteries, especially LFP batteries, means that you have really good potentially battery energy storage systems that can help with, say, smart grids or just generally dealing with renewable energy. You also have the emergence of drones like DJI and sensors like from Huawei and RoboSense. And so all of these together start to compound and build on each other.
The smartphone industry is also part of this. And you get what I call these sort of overlapping tech industrial ecosystems, where they start to feed into each other, where as your batteries get better, it improves your EVs and your robots. As your chips get better, that improves your AI systems and your industrial automation capabilities.
So as each area advances, it sort of pulls other industries along with it. And I think that's this virtuous cycle that we're starting to see right now in China.
I see. Do we see any of these virtuous cycles here in the U.S.? How do we compare to how China is doing at this moment? I think we used to have more of that in the United States. But I think some of the hollowing out of manufacturing in the U.S. has made that more difficult. So you still have sort of bright spots.
You know, people forget that we still manufacture semiconductors here, and that actually seems to be experiencing a renaissance with the CHIPS Act. There are other sort of high tech, high value parts of the industrial base that we still retain, but a lot of that we also let go of. And so I think it will be tricky to try to recreate some of this broader depth of supply chain that we're seeing in China.
Right now with the U.S. robotics industry, for example, a lot of those robotics startups are using Chinese robots or Chinese robot components. So that gives you a sense of, you know, how sort of dependent the two countries are on each other and how tough it is to replicate that kind of ecosystem.
Do you see the Chinese lead over the U.S. in these areas being sustained in the long term?
I do. I think that fundamentally China is making investments in not only sort of at the firm level and not only industry by industry, but on the scientific foundations themselves. Investments in human capital, in universities, public research funding. China's increased its budget for public scientific research.
And I think they're really what I call technology-pilled. You know, they're really into using technology, advancing technology, and trying to use that to help solve or address or, you know, improve aspects of society or the economy. And so I think that that kind of longer term investment, you know, it may not be clear always whether China will be in the lead in a certain industry or not. But overall, with that kind of scientific foundation and the human capital foundation, I actually think that that will pay off in the long run.
So what are the reasons behind China's technological prowess? Dr. Chan attributes it to a wealth of government support for these industries that range from subsidies to infrastructure financing and research grants.
I want to bring up a statistic that you've mentioned before that I thought was very eye-opening in which several Chinese universities like Peking and Tsinghua universities, which I'd venture to say most people in the U.S. have never heard of, but which are the top universities in China, ranked above MIT, Stanford, and Oxford in the 2025 Nature Index, an assessment done by one of the most prestigious scientific publishers of institutions and their scientific output. What does this statistic say about how China's technological leadership has come about?
I think this is a really meaningful indicator for this broader scientific progress. I think that it shows that there really is a foundation there, that not only are the tech companies at the commercialization phase very competitive, but that the universities themselves that are producing the graduates, the future engineers and managers and scientists that go to these companies, that those universities are becoming increasingly world-class.
And so it includes universities like Peking University and Tsinghua. It also includes a whole range of other universities across China that a lot of people may not have heard of, but have come to develop reputations, niches within the engineering and science space. So I think it's a sign that actually, whether you look at patents, whether you look at citation counts, publications in prestigious journals, any way you slice it, I think that we see that there is that very strong scientific foundation.
And I know that it is a bit of a stereotype that Chinese students have an emphasis on STEM and math and science, but it sounds like this is an advantage for them in terms of their technological developments.
That's right. Yeah. So it even gets very specific. It gets down to the level of specific semiconductor materials like silicon carbide chips. It gets down to the level of rare earths, engineering and mining, specialties that we don't really see anymore in the U.S., at least not in the same depth. And I think that emphasis, again, on building sort of the future engineers, the future scientists that will be not only the pioneers in terms of breakthrough research, but also the technicians, the people operating the machinery, working in the factories, monitoring all of these systems, that you sort of have that very high baseline to start with.
So just in terms of a numbers game, China's population is four times that of the U.S. Do you think that it is almost inevitable that China will maintain this lead over the U.S. now that it's built up a solid foundation? Or are there possibilities for the U.S. to make similar investments?
Yeah, I think it'll be a close call. And I think it will depend a lot, not just on what China's doing, but what the United States does. So there's a saying, I forget who originally said it, so it's not mine. But there's a saying that China can draw upon a pool of 1.4 billion people in terms of its talent pool. But the U.S. in theory can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion people if we do things right. Many people from around the world often want to come to the United States to study here, to start companies here.
And that's a very, very valuable asset that makes American companies, American universities, world leaders. So I think that if we want to think about it as a race between the U.S. and China in some of these science and technology fields, I think that it would make sense for U.S. policy to sort of lean into its strengths in terms of being able to attract some of the best talent from around the world. I think the question of talent, the question of trying to build that kind of human capital is something that both countries are grappling with.
Do you think of it as a race? Are there situations in which it is possible for it to be a win-win situation for U.S. consumers or Chinese consumers worldwide?
Definitely. Yeah. I mean, you can see how tightly integrated the supply chains are between the two countries, how difficult it is. Another way to see it is how hard it is to separate those supply chains. The business reliance on each other, the fact that we buy and sell goods and services to each other at a scale that I think is sort of unprecedented in human history, and also the people-to-people exchanges, people going to study across the two different countries, that benefits scientific research and progress across the board. You think about areas like drug discovery, new therapies.
You think about even work on AI, where many of the top AI researchers in the United States, many of them got their degrees, undergrad degrees, in China. So in many ways, if we do this right, and it won't always be easy, but there could be a lot of upside to finding a way to build off of each other's strengths together. And right now we're facing some pretty tough geopolitical circumstances.
There's a lot of mutual suspicion at the political level, and it's understandable. But at the same time, it's useful to recognize what could be lost if we don't try to kind of salvage that relationship.
My last question for you is, what is something that you think Americans should know about China that they might not know already?
Yeah, I think one of the biggest messages that I hope gets out there, and it's starting to change, is that China can innovate.That the technology, the progress, is not all stolen or copied purely or taken in some way. That there's actually a lot of capability within China, as well as across research collaborations with the rest of the world, that have enabled China to make so much progress in so many areas. So at the end of the day, when you ever get a chance to drive a BYD electric car, or in the U.S., you can buy a DJI drone and fly it around. That is the product of all of that investment, all of that training, all of that capital and human capital that was invested over many, many years.
Thank you so much, Dr. Chan. I really appreciate your time.
My pleasure.
Note, the FCC has effectively banned the purchase of new models of DJI drones as of December 2025.
Let's go over today's episode.
The transfer of technological know-how from foreign partners, including the U.S., helped jumpstart China's tech scene. But China has since become dominant in numerous cutting-edge technologies due to long-term investment from the government into science and technology, both commercially and academically. Their advancements in numerous sectors build off of one another in a positive feedback loop, furthering the capabilities of what are often interconnected sectors, like batteries and EVs.
The U.S. and China's economies are tightly interwoven on an unprecedented scale that benefits both, and its people-to-people exchanges drive scientific progress. China is not riding on U.S. coattails, and these days, in some areas like robotics, it may be closer to being the other way around. The 2022 CHIPS Act upped U.S. investment in semiconductors, one of its strengths. Time will tell if the U.S. plays the right cards to fortify its technological game.
This podcast is associated with China Focus, the student-run publication of the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego. For more expert-driven research and analysis on China, visit china.ucsd.edu. See you again on China 101.