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How China Made America Unaffordable
The hidden story of how two rival superpowers started borrowing from the same playbook
Kartik Vyas & Gen Kimura
June 18, 2026
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What’s in This Week’s Issue…
Good morning. America spent years criticizing China for its surveillance systems, government-backed industries, and concentration of power.
What few people noticed is that many of the technologies that helped power China's rise came from American companies in the first place.
So this week…
🏆 The Big Play: How America Became More Like China
💪 The Power Move: Why rival systems often end up looking more alike than they admit
💵 Follow the Money: Is the Iran war ending with the new peace deal?
-GEN
🏆 The Big Play
The biggest money power story of the week.
How America Became More Like China
China has now surpassed the US in R&D spending
The debate about China is usually framed around tariffs, trade deficits, and manufacturing.
Yet the biggest part of China's rise wasn't built inside Chinese factories. It was built through decades of access to American technology, expertise, and know-how.
And as China transformed those capabilities into competitive industries, some of the same ideas began making the return journey home.
1. How America Helped Build The Foundation
China's transformation into an economic superpower required far more than factories and cheap labor.
Building a modern economy required networking infrastructure, database systems, advanced semiconductors, enterprise software, and the computing power capable of connecting hundreds of millions of businesses and consumers.
Many of those building blocks came from America:
IBM worked with Chinese partners on policing and information systems.
Cisco supplied networking infrastructure.
Oracle provided database and mapping technologies.
Dell, HP, Intel, and Nvidia supplied hardware that powered China's growing technological capabilities.
American firms earned billions helping build the infrastructure behind China's modernization.
The arrangement looked mutually beneficial. China gained access to world-class technology, American companies gained access to a massive market, and consumers benefited from cheaper products.
Yet every database platform, networking system, and advanced semiconductor transferred expertise that China could eventually develop on its own.
America thought it was exporting products; in reality, it was exporting capabilities.
What the U.S. and China depend on each other for
2. Competition Changed The Relationship
America's edge was never that it could manufacture things more cheaply. Its edge was that it kept creating the industries everyone else wanted to copy.
That assumption is becoming harder to take for granted:
Ford CEO Jim Farley described China's electric vehicle industry as one of the most humbling competitive experiences of his career.
Chinese automaker BYD evolved from a follower into a serious global competitor.
Chinese AI firms continued advancing despite restrictions on access to advanced American technology.
Engineers working across both ecosystems increasingly acknowledge how quickly Chinese capabilities have improved.
The semiconductor industry offers one of the clearest examples.
In 2022, the United States restricted exports of advanced Nvidia chips in an effort to slow China's AI development. Instead of slowing progress, the restrictions accelerated China's efforts to develop alternatives and reduce dependence on American technology.
While America focused on making products cheaper, China was learning how those products were designed, built, financed, and scaled.
Once that learning turned into competition, the relationship changed completely.
Compared to China’s, the US EV exports are less than $4B
3. The Same Pressures Produced Similar Solutions
Most people assume the story ends with China borrowing from America.
The more interesting story is what happened next:
Flock has deployed networks of license-plate-reading cameras capable of tracking vehicle movements across thousands of communities.
Palantir built its business by helping governments and organizations combine enormous datasets into systems capable of identifying patterns, relationships, and individuals in seconds.
And even the US govt has increasingly embraced industrial policies designed to support semiconductor manufacturing and strategically important industries.
AI is also becoming concentrated around a small number of companies with access to the most advanced chips, the largest datasets, and the computing infrastructure required to train frontier models.
The fact is, China remains more state-led while America remains more market-driven.
But both countries have become increasingly comfortable with surveillance technologies, industrial policy, and concentrated economic power.
That is the irony at the heart of this story.
America spent years treating China's model as a warning. What it missed was that many of the forces that created that model were beginning to emerge at home as well.
Because the biggest story of the last thirty years isn't that China learned from America.
It's that competition gradually pushed both countries toward the same playbook.
💪 The Power Moves
Playbook for understanding the game of power.
Why Rival Systems Often End Up Looking Alike
China is rapidly closing in on the US innovation lead
Most people assume countries adopt policies because they share the same values.
More often, they adopt policies because they face the same pressures:
→ China turned to American technology because it accelerated modernization.
→ The United States turned to industrial policy when semiconductor supply chains became a strategic concern.
Nvidia chip restrictions encouraged Chinese firms to develop alternatives, while companies such as Flock and Palantir expanded because governments wanted more visibility and faster decision-making.
The details differ, but the underlying pattern is the same: competitors facing similar pressures often arrive at similar solutions.
The Takeaway:
When two rivals begin looking more alike than different, stop focusing on what they say and start focusing on the problems they are trying to solve.
Because the most important shifts in power rarely happen when competitors copy each other's products.
They happen when competitors begin copying each other's playbooks.
💵 Following the Money
Three of the wildest financial and corruption stories from around the world.
President Trump signing the Iran deal in Versailles, France
✨ Poll time!
Do you think America helped create the China it fears today? |
