Has the U.S. lost its dominance to China?
Well, let’s get to the tech war, ’cause China and the U.S. are competing for the position of No. 1 in tech. What is China ahead on?
OSNOS: China has built a large lead when it comes to manufacturing a lot of the hardware of our technological lives. So things that you mentioned earlier – things like electric vehicles, which China now builds more of than anywhere else. The – a Chinese company called BYD has surpassed Tesla, for instance, as the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. You know, they also make solar cells and lithium-ion batteries, and it’s really essentially a dominant lead. They make more than 70% of all that worldwide.
And what they’re focused on now, and we know this ’cause they say it explicitly and we see it in the data around production, is they’re essentially trying to do for AI and biotechnology and robotics what they did for that previous generation of technology. Meaning, take something that was basically invented in the United States and surge resources into it and build up a lead that is so substantial that other countries have no choice but to be reliant on China, while China doesn’t have to be reliant on them.
GROSS: And just as China is investing all these resources into research – tech research, pharmaceutical research – it’s, as we were saying, simultaneous with the Trump administration withdrawing funding from those very same things.
OSNOS: Yeah. There’s a really acute demonstration of this when you look at the science around drug discovery and biotechnology. In Trump’s first term, the Department of Justice launched something called the China Initiative, which was intended to root out espionage and trade theft. And as a result, there were a number of cases brought against scientists of Chinese origin. And over time, you began to see that many Chinese scientists in the United States were getting disenchanted. There was a study done by scholars in the U.S. that found that between 2010 and 2021, that 20,000 Chinese scientists left the United States, which is a substantial number.
And as one American executive said to me recently – he said, we are now concerned that China is going to do to biotech what it did to electric vehicles, meaning that all of this talent that has returned to China will be able to contribute to discovering the next generation of major drugs faster than the United States can do it. And we’re already seeing that this shows up now in statistics around drug discovery. China is basically able to produce almost a third of the promising new compounds for new pharmaceuticals, which is nearly matching what had been the U.S. lead. And that gap has essentially closed.
GROSS: Well, in talking about how AI and robots are being used in China, give us an example of one of the most dramatic, surprising, kind of overwhelming amount of robots or AI you witnessed in one spot.
OSNOS: Probably the most dramatic demonstration of this is at a car factory. There’s a place in Beijing run by a company called Xiaomi, which started out making smartphones and, you know, kind of household electronics. And they got into the car business about four or five years ago, and they built this enormous factory known as the Hyperfactory.
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