Washington's AI battlefield ill-advised as blacklist cannot rein in China's tech rise: China Daily editorial

The Pentagon's latest expansion of its so-called Section 1286 list, which now includes 88 Chinese entities ranging from defense contractors to prestigious universities, marks another step away from strategic competition toward strategic exclusion.

Science, once celebrated as a bridge between nations, is being recast as a battlefield where almost any major Chinese breakthrough is presumed to carry military intent.

The timing is revealing. The blacklist was expanded just days after Chinese company Moonshot AI unveiled its Kimi K3, a model that some observers described as a possible "Sputnik moment" for artificial intelligence. Washington's response was equally telling. Smearing China's open-source model as a potential "security threat", it tightened restrictions on the institutions most closely associated with Chinese scientific research.

Whenever China narrows the technological gap, the policy debate in Washington shifts to restrictions. The objective is no longer simply to protect genuinely sensitive technologies but to preserve the United States' technological leadership through ill-advised administrative means.

The latest Section 301 investigation into alleged "industrial overcapacity" illustrates the same instinct. The concept itself is remarkably elastic. Any country that produces more than its domestic market consumes can suddenly find its industrial success redefined as "evidence" of "unfair competition". Comparative advantage, once the intellectual foundation of global trade, risks becoming a "principle" honored only when it benefits the US.

Such policies may satisfy domestic politics in the US, but they are producing consequences very different from those intended.

Rather than slowing Chinese innovation, the US' restrictive policies have strengthened China's resolve to achieve self-reliance in sci-tech innovation. Faced with repeated attempts to curb its technological advances, China is investing heavily in indigenous semiconductors, AI, advanced manufacturing and scientific infrastructure. Every new external restriction simply serves as further incentive for homegrown innovation.

Ironically, Washington may be helping accelerate the creation of the very ecosystem in China it is trying to prevent.

Researchers associated with UNESCO have warned that the world is moving toward a "dual-track" scientific architecture, with separate standards, supply chains, research networks and governance systems.

Such fragmentation, driven by some US politicians' shortsighted moves, carries costs for everyone. Scientific progress has historically depended less on geopolitical loyalty than on openness, collaboration and the exchange of ideas.

It also harms US interests. Washington's export controls have imposed substantial market-value losses on US suppliers. Restricting access to the world's second-largest economy has proved far easier than finding another market capable of replacing it.

The deeper problem is that Washington may be addressing the wrong challenge. The real issue lies in its own capacity for renewal. History shows that great powers rarely decline because rivals become stronger; they decline because their political systems lose the ability to reform themselves.

A polarized political class, mounting institutional distrust and the growing temptation to externalize domestic frustrations are more reminiscent of the Roman Republic's Gracchi era than of ancient Sparta confronting Athens. When governments struggle to solve problems at home, foreign countries become politically convenient substitutes for difficult domestic reform.

The postwar international order endured not simply because the US was the strongest power, but because it supplied some global public goods — open markets, scientific collaboration and broadly accepted rules of international commerce.

Today, however, Washington increasingly treats those very public goods as instruments of bullying, coercion and containment. Such practices actually weaken the international system that has long amplified US influence.

History suggests that major countries rarely preserve their competitiveness by retreating behind barriers. They acquire their competitiveness by making themselves the place where brightest minds want to collaborate, invest and innovate. If Washington continues to define competition as exclusion, it risks discovering that the primary casualty of technological "decoupling" is not China's innovation, but the US' own.

Innovation is not a finite resource that one country can monopolize at another's expense.