Opinion | While Trump fixes himself on the trade, China pulls away

For years, theorists have set up the beginning of a “Chinese century”: a world in which China finally uses its extensive economic and technological potential to exceed the United States and the global power over a pole that runs through Beijing.

This century could already be drawn, and if historians look back, they can very well determine the early months of the second term of the second term of trump as a water sheath in which China retired and the United States left behind.

It does not matter that Washington and Beijing have achieved a non -conclusive and temporary ceasefire in the trade war of Mr. Trump. The US President immediately claimed as victory, but this only underlines the basic problem for the Trump government and America: short -sighted focus on irrelevant skirmishes because the greater war with China is decisively lost.

Mr. Trump takes a demolition ball to the pillars of American power and innovation. His tariffs endanger the access of the US companies to global markets and supply chains. He lowered public research financing and contains our universities, which considerably considered talented researchers to go to other countries. He wants to roll back programs for technologies such as Clean Energy and Semiconductor Manufacturing and deletes the American soft power in large parts of the world.

China's trajectory could not be more different.

It already leads global production in several industries – steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar energy, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G devices, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and ball trains. Half-and-global production will probably make up 45 percent fast by 2030. Beijing is also laser-oriented to win the future: In March, it announced a national venture capital fund of $ 138 billion, which increases long-term investments in top technologies such as quantum computers and robotics and increases the budget for public research and development.

The results of the Chinese approach were breathtaking.

When the Chinese start-up Deepseek started its chat bot for artificial intelligence in January, many Americans suddenly found that China could compete in the AI, but there were a number of such sputnik moments.