by Margaret Kimberley

“It’s pretty ironic that we’ve gone within the space of 3 years from the US banning
chip exports to China to slow their tech development, to China now telling its
companies to avoid those same US chips in favor of domestic alternatives –
which now exist because of those US export controls.”

—Arnaud Bertrand¹

In July of 2025, Black Agenda Report was invited to join media outlets from around the world to participate in the 2025 Belt and Road Journalists Forum which was held in the city of Ganzhou, located in Jiangxi province, China. As executive editor, I traveled to Jiangxi and experienced China’s world-famous high-speed rail as I traveled from Jingdezhen to Ganzhou. At one point, a video screen on the train reported that it reached a speed of 300 kilometers per hour, the equivalent of 186 miles per hour. 

The United States Amtrak rail service recently added five upgraded trains to its high-speed Acela service between Boston, Massachusetts and the nation’s capital city of Washington. Press announcements reported that among other improvements, these new Acela trains, known as NextGen, can reach a speed of 160 miles per hour. However, because tracks along the route have not been upgraded,² they will rarely reach this top speed, which is already low in comparison to China’s high-speed rail service. While the U.S. introduced new, faster trains along what is known as the Northeast Corridor with great fanfare, the People’s Republic of China has the world’s largest high-speed rail system, which covers more than 25,000 miles.

This anecdote about train travel explains why any idea of the United States being able to restrict China’s growth as an economic and political power is a non-starter. The United States spends more money on its military—over $994 billion in Fiscal Year 2024—than the next nine countries combined,³ but is behind the rest of the world in spending its resources to help its people. Train travel from its capital to major cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston is hobbled by a lack of the kind of infrastructure that China excels in producing and maintaining.

While the military budget grows, it cannot account for the huge expenditures approved by presidents and members of Congress of both major parties. In fact, the Department of Defense has failed every annual audit it has been required to carry out since that process became required in 2018, and is the only federal agency that is still unable to pass an audit.⁴ Democrats and Republicans alike are committed to throwing away public funds on a military-industrial complex which does nothing to improve the lives of the people. On the other hand, a true high-speed rail system would benefit millions.

For years, United States politicians, from presidents to members of Congress, have insisted that China can and must be “contained”. The cry for this impossible dream is completely bipartisan; there is no daylight between Republicans and Democrats when Sinophobia is on the political agenda. China’s economic strength is labeled as “overcapacity” as it continues in its role as the manufacturing juggernaut of the world and now as the leader in technology. 

Yes, China’s Reform and Opening Up and years of planning have made it so, but the West, especially the U.S., played a role in its own demise as finance capital deindustrialized its nations, creating economic dislocation and even coining the new phrase “Rust Belt” to describe the regions decimated by greed and short-sighted thinking. These ill-fated decisions coincided with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, and the rest, as the expression goes, is history. 

It doesn’t matter whether a Republican or a Democrat is the president of the United States, or which party controls Congress. The obsessive belief that the U.S. should control or contain China is constant. This mania manifests in different ways. For example, Joe Biden may call China’s President Xi Jinping a dictator, or former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi may tell silly stories about digging a hole to China when she defied Beijing’s wishes and paid a visit to Taiwan.⁵ U.S. officials cannot accept that their country is outmatched and that any thought of dominating China, a major world power, is absurd on its face. This absurdity is the rule, not the exception, when China becomes an issue in U.S. politics. 

The Biden Administration was the first to enact restrictions on sales of advanced computer chips to China. Yet even think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, an important part of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, acknowledge the folly of such an effort, writing that “starving China’s supply of U.S.-designed AI chips will have the opposite effect, as it will push China to more effectively develop and deploy its own AI chip capacity and ecosystem.”⁶

In fact, China has moved ahead not just in artificial intelligence chip production but in building the grid needed to make AI possible. China has an oversupply of electricity while the U.S. grid is so weak that the race may be over⁷ as it struggles to build AI data centers that the public oppose because of stresses on the already underdeveloped infrastructure.⁸ The announcement of DeepSeek revealed that a Chinese company had created an open-source Artificial Intelligence platform at a fraction of the cost of the much-vaunted ChatGPT. There can be no containment of China; Biden’s efforts to restrict chip production in China resulted in more and better chip production instead.

The Huawei telecom giant provides another example of foolish decisions which may inconvenience China temporarily, but hurt the U.S. more. In 2019, the Biden Administration passed the National Defense Authorization Act which included provisions forbidding U.S. government agencies from contracting with entities that use Huawei components, only for the Defense Department to request exemptions from the ban. According to Bloomberg, Huawei was “so firmly entrenched” in the telecommunications systems of the countries where it does business that finding a replacement would be “impossible.”⁹

Today, the Trump Administration is attempting more of the same. While Donald Trump is ending green energy projects, recently cancelling $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects¹⁰ and bragging about prioritizing fossil fuel production, China is marching ahead, and is now the world leader in clean energy, installing more wind and solar capacity in one year than exists in the entire United States.¹¹  

Trump believed that he could bully China into submission with an announcement of tariffs that eventually reached the 145% mark.¹² He made the bizarre announcement on what he called Liberation Day, which amounted to the declaration of a trade war against the rest of the world, and then seemed to be surprised when China would not agree to his demands. He sought to save face by announcing a 90-day pause before enacting the tariffs, but China was not swayed, and refused his demands, which would ultimately have only succeeded in raising prices for U.S. consumers.

While USians run from one foolish accusation to another—that China is buying up farmland, depriving U.S. students of college enrollment, sending spy balloons that can be seen with the naked eye, or stealing technology—it is rare that socialism is acknowledged as being the foundation of China’s success. Doing so would mean that the capitalist West would have to examine itself and find itself lacking.

China’s planned economy and emphasis on people-centered decision-making inevitably resulted in a country which does a better job of meeting its people’s needs. A country which spends billions of dollars on the military—or rather, feeds that money to military contractors—will inevitably fail at meeting the needs of its population. To the U.S. government, the needs of the people are not only of no consequence, but meeting those needs would damage a system which is meant to be a money laundering scheme for capitalists. Why would such a state feel the need to improve transportation when its true goal is to enrich the already rich and to protect their interests? The people are in fact seen as a hindrance who, if given the opportunity, might obstruct the corruption that has become normalized.

The U.S. political economic system is based on the drive for what is known as primacy, the belief that no other country should move ahead of it economically or politically. Even allies of the U.S. aren’t truly allies but vassals, and any country that is not a vassal is considered an enemy. While the U.S. finds new ways to wage a trade war against the rest of the world, China announced that it would conduct tariff-free trade with 53 of 54 African nations.¹³ The people-centered philosophy extends to other nations too.

One country produces clean energy because it meets the people’s needs, while another promotes fossil fuels because the fossil fuel industry dictates policy. Capitalism controls the United States. The word “democracy” is thrown about quite frequently, but it is little more than a marketing ploy, a ruse meant to quiet the population and convince them that periodically changing from one wing of the duopoly to the other will solve their problems. The truth can no longer be denied. The country emerging as the preeminent economy in the world has done so because it is socialist, and that is why it cannot be contained.

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¹Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand), x.com, August 12, 2025, https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1955286249029202411.

²Tom Sanders, “Amtrak Rolls Out New High-Speed Trains Running Slower Than the Old Ones,” The Daily Beast, August 28, 2025, https://www.thedailybeast.com/amtrak-rolls-out-new-high-speed-trains-running-slower-than-the-old-ones/.

³Peter G. Peterson Foundation, The United States Spends More on Defense than the Next 9 Countries Combined (Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 2025), https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-on-defense-than-the-next-9-countries-combined/.

⁴Lindsay Koshgarian, “Take 7: The Pentagon Fails Another Audit,” National Priorities Project, November 25, 2024, https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2024/11/25/take-7-pentagon-fails-another-audit/.

⁵Margaret Kimberley, “Nancy Pelosi, White Supremacy, and China,” Black Agenda Report, August 10, 2022, https://blackagendareport.com/nancy-pelosi-white-supremacy-and-china.

⁶John Villasenor, “How Overly Aggressive Bans on AI Chip Exports to China Can Backfire,” The Brookings Institution, August 15, 2025, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-overly-aggressive-bans-on-ai-chip-exports-to-china-can-backfire/.

⁷Eva Roytburg, “AI Experts Return from China Stunned: The U.S. Grid Is so Weak, the Race May Already Be Over,” Fortune, August 14, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-infrastructure/.

⁸Brad Reed, “Cheers Erupt as Tucson City Council Unanimously Kills Massive Amazon-Linked Data Centers,” Common Dreams, August 7, 2025, https://www.commondreams.org/news/tucson-arizona-data-center.

⁹Global Times, “US’ Ban on Huawei Eventually Boomerangs on Itself,” Global Times, July 4, 2024, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202407/1315441.shtml.

¹⁰ Lauren Sommer, “Trump Administration Cancels $679 Million for Offshore Wind Projects at Ports,” National Public Radio, August 31, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/08/31/nx-s1-5522943/trump-offshore-wind-energy-ports.

¹¹ Ella Nilsen, “America Was Already Losing to China on Clean Energy. Trump Just Sealed Its Fate,” CNN, July 16, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/16/climate/china-us-wind-solar-energy-trump.

¹²Lionel Lim, “Trump’s ‘Done’ Deal with China Just Brings Tariffs Back to Liberation Day Levels,” Fortune, June 12, 2025, https://fortune.com/asia/2025/06/12/trumps-done-deal-china-brings-tariffs-back-to-liberation-day-levels/.

¹³Liao Ruiling, “China Implements Zero-Tariff Policy for 53 African Countries,” People’s Daily Online, August 13, 2025, https://en.people.cn/n3/2025/0813/c90000-20352561.html.

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Margaret Kimberley is a co-founder, executive editor and senior columnist at Black Agenda Report. She has twice participated in delegations traveling to China. Her work as an activist includes leadership roles in the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). Ms. Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. She has also contributed to the anthologies Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence, In Defense of Julian Assange, Capitalism on a Ventilator: the Impact of COVID-19 in China and the U.S., From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, and Confronting Counterinsurgency: Cop Cities and Democracy’s Terrors. In 2024 she briefed the United Nations Security Council as a civil society representative.