How MAGA May Be Fueling China’s AI Rise

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
Playing the tariff war game with China seems to have somewhat startled the US, in what Trump thought would be a walkover. Being a leading superpower with a highly specialized and efficient manufacturing and technology base that has taken decades to build, China has embedded itself in global supply chains and as such it drives global trade.
China’s technological capability has grown exponentially and its current innovation in AI shows it to be an on par player with the US. In my mind, the question of whether China will surpass the US in terms of AI supremacy is a question of when, instead of if. Progress in the country is astounding and its approach to AI seems to be embracing an open source innovations, unlike the US approach of working with closed source tech controlled by a few.
The US’s success in technological progression laid in its openness, was the reason it surpassed the world for many decades. Trumps break from such openness threatens this and leaves the doors open for China to dominate the AI sector, as it has become the world’s leading technological innovator.
China’s evolution in the world of AI can be traced back to the early 90’s, where the US led the internet and was a technology trailblazer, fueling the new tech economy with fast lab to market innovations. This led to strong growth and rapid gains where China was in essence a follower, mirroring US success and launching its own competing range of online services and digital tech, in a copycat like manner.
As China’s digital ecosystem matured in the mid-2000s, Chinese firms started to leverage their expertise, building on US concepts and ideas to build their own national brands and online communities that started to outpace their US counterparts. Platforms like WeChat surpassed US equivalents such as WhatsApp, which were fine-tuned to the Chinese market, leading to massive domestic uptake and growth.
Over the past decade, China has advanced even further and moved into the realm of producing homegrown innovations that are taking the world by storm. This can be seen in an array of innovative Chinese technology, such as in the electric vehicle space, where brands such as BYD offer great functionality, design and innovation at a fraction of the cost of their US competition.
I can see the same happening in the AI space, which is already disrupting the market with its AI innovations such as DeepSeek and Qwen (among many others), giving US tech such as ChatGPT a run for its money. These on par competitors also serve English markets and pose a viable threat to US developed AI technology.
The sheer size of the Chinese user base provides ideal conditions for deploying and testing of AI applications, with over 1 billion internet users in the country. This along with its huge manufacturing and industrial base means that China generates a huge amount of data that can be used to train AI models. This along with it major power production, almost double of that of the US, gives it a distinct advantage to power data centers and push the widespread adoption of its AI. It has the capacity to grow a voracious appetite to learn, which puts it in prime position to lead the global AI sector.
This is not to say that China does not face its own domestic issues, which are compounded by a complicated relationship with the US, as well as creating a domestic environment that balances between encouraging innovation and limiting state control, which could stifle progress and investment.
This is very much in contrast to what is happening in the US, with Trump’s cuts to AI research, immigration as well as major cuts in funding to its leading research Universities. Trump’s tight immigration policies also threaten to restrict the talent coming into the country, as well as making it harder to attract and retain talent, which may well cause a US brain drain. Chinese specialists in particular, may end up taking lucrative positions back home in their own thriving AI sector.