ECONOMICS – Industrial and competition policy in China since the entry at the WTO in 2001: strategic convergence at odds with the European model?

By François Souty

François Souty, PhD in Economic History, former International Affairs Officer at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition (2021-2024), was a member of theOECD Committee of Experts on Competition Policy from 1996 to 2024. He teaches EU institutions and geopolitics at the Excelia Business School group (La Rochelle-Paris Cachan) and EU Competition Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law of the University of Nantes. He is the head of the Economics section at Le Diplomate Media.

« Governing a great state is like cooking a small fish. » Lao Tzu, Dao De Jing (The Book of the Way and Virtue), chap. 60, trans. Jean Lévi, Paris, Albin Michel, 1990.

Executive Summary

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001 was long interpreted in Western economies as a prelude to a gradual convergence of this country towards a liberal market model. Twenty-five years later, this hypothesis appears to be largely disproved. Far from having abandoned strategic planning or the structuring role of the state, China has gradually developed a very original model of managed capitalism articulating trade opening, technological management, industrial policy, financial control, normative power and competitive supervision.

This article analyses the main stages of this transformation since 2001. It shows how traditional industrial policy instruments — subsidies, public credit, state-owned enterprises, sector planning, public procurement, data control, technological standardization, or support for national champions — have been progressively integrated into an overall strategy of economic and geopolitical power. It also highlights the special role played by Chinese competition law since the 2007 antimonopoly law, which does not exclusively pursue the objectives of economic efficiency, but also participates in a broader logic of economic security, political stability and technological sovereignty

Our study then examines the main controversies raised by this original model in international trade relations: technology transfers, industrial overcapacity, public subsidies, numerical restrictions, critical dependencies or asymmetric competition. It analyses the responses gradually developed by the United States and the European Union, in a context marked by the global return of industrial policies, the erosion of the free trade consensus and the rise of economic security considerations.

Finally, the article highlights the serious structural limits of the European model in the face of Chinese strategic coherence: institutional fragmentation, budgetary constraints, state aid discipline, strategic inconsistencies especially in energy, slow decision-making, possible industrial ideological prejudices and persistent difficulty in articulating competition, industrial sovereignty and geoeconomic power. He defends the idea that China has gradually built not only an original synthesis between market, state and power strategy, but that it contributes to a lasting transformation of the classic categories of international economic law.

Introduction

When China joined the World Trade Organization on December 11, 2001, a significant part of the Western political and economic elites saw this event as the culmination of a historic process of convergence towards a liberal market economy. China’s gradual integration into global value chains, the opening up to foreign investment, the modernization of its productive apparatus and the dissemination of international trade standards should, according to this reading, eventually lead to an increasing liberalization of its economy and a reduction in the direct role of the State in the allocation of resources.

Implicit in this assumption was the idea that trade integration would mechanically produce institutional convergence. However, the two decades since China entered the multilateral trading system have revealed a very different trajectory. Far from constituting a linear transition to a market capitalism comparable to Western models, the Chinese experience has gradually given rise to a very original form of administered capitalism, combining international openness, centralized political control, technological planning, massive industrial support and strategic use of competitive mechanisms. The colossal volumes of Chinese GDP in question tend to verify the observations of several major American economists of the 1990s, whose meaning takes on a premonitory and even historical significance despite the total lack of consideration of the accelerated development of the Chinese economy and its knock-on effects. Thus, the work of Lester Thurow, Laura D’Andrea Tyson and Robert Reich profoundly structured the American geoeconomic thinking of the 1990s in question and inspired, to varying degrees, the industrial and trade policies of the Clinton administrations. All three shared a fundamental intuition: in a globalized economy dominated by technological and industrial competition, power no longer resides solely in traditional comparative advantages, but in the ability of the large integrated economic areas to impose their standards, their technological norms, their rules of competition and their forms of productive organization on the rest of the world. Thurow placed particular emphasis on the systemic rivalry between major continental blocs—the United States, the European Union, Japan—while Tyson emphasized the role of industrial policies and large domestic markets in structuring high-tech industries. Reich, on the other hand, shifted the analysis to globalized value chains and competition through knowledge. Anu Bradford will later extend this intuition into a legal and regulatory perspective with the theory of the « Brussels Effect « , perhaps outdated in 2026, according to which the size of the European market allows the European Union to export its standards extraterritorially to the rest of the world. However, these authors, despite their remarkable ability to anticipate the changes in post-Fordist capitalism at the dawn of the developments of the digital economy, had not envisaged the irruption of China as a total systemic power: at the same time a continental market, a strategic state, an industrial, technological, financial and normative power capable, in turn, of competing simultaneously and simultaneously with the United States and the European Union in the definition of the rules of global economy. These authors are somewhat forgotten today, but their systemic intuitions were well-founded, although ultimately disproved geographically.^[1]

China’s original industrial and digital model is not the result of a simple return to traditional dirigisme, nor of a rejection of the market economy. On the contrary, it is based on a new sophisticated hybridization between market mechanisms and state coordination, in which competition is not conceived as an autonomous end but as an instrument among others in the service of higher objectives of stability, industrial upgrading, economic security and national power. In this architecture, state-owned enterprises, state-owned banks, industrial funds, standardization policies, data monitoring, targeted subsidies, public procurement and competition law are part of the same strategic whole.

The adoption of the Chinese anti-monopoly law in 2007 is a particular illustration of this specificity. Inspired in part by the American and European experiences, it has never pursued exclusively a classic logic of preserving consumer well-being or economic efficiency.^[2] On the contrary, its application reveals a close link between the objectives of economic efficiency, industrial policy, control of digital platforms, social stability and national security.

This gradual transformation of the world political economy is now leading the major industrial powers to re-examine their own competitive and industrial doctrines. In the United States, both Democratic and Republican administrations have gradually reintroduced considerations of economic security, technological sovereignty and industrial resilience at the heart of public action. The rise of technological controls, relocation policies, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act thus testifies to the assumed return of a logic of economic power in the conduct of public policies.

The European Union itself now seems to be engaged in a gradual revision of some of the foundations of its economic model. Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on the future of European competitiveness made a particularly stark assessment of Europe’s industrial, technological and strategic lag behind the United States and China. Stressing the fragmentation of European markets, the inadequacy of joint investments, the weakness of financing capacities and the limits of a sometimes excessively formalistic application of competition law, this report called for a profound European industrial and institutional leap forward.^[3]

However, despite this growing awareness, European instruments are still widely dispersed and often on a smaller scale than the coordinated arrangements implemented by the major competing powers.^[4] In this respect, China’s trajectory reveals less the existence of a simple alternative model than that of a truly integrated strategic rationality, in which competition, industry, technology, finance, data, economic security and international power are part of the same long-term architecture.

The Chinese issue now goes far beyond the framework of international trade or competition law. More fundamentally, it refers to the contemporary recomposition of the relationship between market, state and power in the world economy. In a context marked by growing geopolitical fragmentation, the return of industrial policies, Sino-American technological rivalries and tensions over strategic supply chains, Chinese industrial policy now appears to be one of the main indicators of the profound changes in contemporary global capitalism.

This article thus proposes to analyse the main transformations of Chinese industrial policy since accession to the WTO, the instruments mobilised by the Chinese authorities, the controversies they have given rise to as well as the profound consequences they induce for the contemporary evolution of competition law, international trade and global economic governance. Particular attention will be paid to the structural differences between Chinese and European capacities for action, in order to highlight the growing tensions between competitive and geoeconomic logics in contemporary developed economies and perhaps to draw lessons beneficial for Europeans if they know the analytical and methodical practices that have led their proto-industrial and then industrial development for so long.

I – From commercial integration to the construction of technologically directed state capitalism (2001-2013)

China’s entry  into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 is one of the most structuring events in contemporary economic history. Rarely has membership of the multilateral trading system had such far-reaching effects on global industrial balances, international value chains, competition policies and, more broadly, on the hierarchy of economic powers. In the space of two decades, China has gone from being the « workshop of the world » to a systemic technological competitor to the major developed economies.

Initially, this integration was widely interpreted, in Europe as well as in the United States, as a vector of a gradual convergence towards a Western-style market economy. According to this reading, trade opening, integration into global production chains, the rise of foreign investment and growing exposure to multilateral disciplines were to lead to a gradual reduction in the economic role of the Chinese state. As Nicholas Lardywrote at the time, « the expansion of market forces in China seemed increasingly irreversible. »^[5]

However, far from leading to a gradual erasure of the strategic state, China’s international integration has, on the contrary, accompanied the rise of an original model combining market mechanisms, centralized political management and long-term industrial policy. This development has come as a profound surprise to a significant part of Western economists. Barry Naughton observes that  » China did not withdraw from industrial policy after joining the WTO; it has considerably extended and modernized it . »^[6]

However, this shift cannot be reduced to a simple resurgence of classic dirigisme. The specificity of the Chinese model lies precisely in its ability to articulate international openness, decentralized experimentation, supervised competition, technological planning and coordinated mobilization of financial, administrative and regulatory instruments. As the Californian economist Chalmers Johnson  points out in his seminal work on the Asian « developer state », « the role of the state is not to replace markets, but to orient them and orient them towards national strategic objectives« .^[7]China’s  trajectory extends and partly exceeds this logic by giving it an unprecedented systemic scope.

This first part proposes to analyze the historical and institutional foundations of this transformation. It will first show how accession to the WTO was perceived as the beginning of an economic and legal convergence towards Western standards, before the singularity of Chinese administered capitalism gradually appeared (A). It will then examine the main industrial policy instruments implemented during the 2000s — sector planning, public financial support, state-owned enterprises, credit control, public procurement or technological policies — that have enabled the acceleration of China’s industrial upscaling (B). Finally, it will analyze the adoption of the 2007 antimonopoly law and how Chinese competition law has gradually become part of a broader architecture of economic sovereignty, technological control, and industrial power (C).

A. Entry at the WTO and Western expectations of convergence towards a market economy

China’s accession to the World Trade Organization on December 11, 2001 marked the culmination of more than fifteen years of particularly complex negotiations with the main Western trading powers. For both the United States and the European Union, China’s integration into the multilateral trading system should promote its sustainable integration into the world market economy and accelerate the reforms undertaken since the opening period initiated by Deng Xiaoping.

At that time, a large part of Western analyses was based on the idea that trade opening would automatically lead to a gradual transformation of Chinese economic and institutional structures. The spread of competitive mechanisms, the rise of the private sector, the influx of foreign investment and integration into global value chains were expected to gradually reduce the weight of state-owned enterprises and limit the State’s capacity for direct intervention. This vision was part of the broader context of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, marked by the conviction that economic globalization would promote a normative convergence of major economic systems.

As Harry First pointed out at the time, a significant part of Western decision-makers considered that China’s integration into the WTO disciplines would gradually lead to a « normalization » of its economy and its competitive institutions.^[8] This perception was reinforced by the major reforms undertaken in the 1990s: partial restructuring of state-owned enterprises, increased openness to foreign investment, development of the export sector and multiplication of joint ventures with Western and Japanese groups.

However, in the first years after accession, several observers began to point out the deep ambiguities of this trajectory. Mark Wu later noted that the classical disciplines of the multilateral trading system had been designed for relatively liberal market economies and struggled to grasp a system in which the state remained structurally present in the allocation of resources.^[9] China formally complied with a significant part of its international commitments while maintaining a high level of administrative, financial and industrial coordination.

At the same time, the Chinese authorities did not conceive their WTO membership as a renunciation of economic sovereignty or strategic planning. On the contrary, international openness appeared above all as an instrument for the accelerated modernization of the national productive apparatus. As Justin Yifu Lin explains, globalization was thought of in China not as an end in itself but as a lever to promote technology transfer, the accumulation of industrial capital and the gradual upscaling of the Chinese economy.^[10]

This logic also appears in the work of Zheng Yongnian, for whom China’s economic opening was never the result of an ideological adherence to Western liberalism, but of a pragmatic strategy of national strengthening articulating international integration and the preservation of political autonomy.^[11] From this perspective, the WTO was less the starting point for China’s economic westernization than a powerful accelerator of its industrial and technological transformation.

The magnitude of the results obtained during the following decade was to profoundly change the global economic balance. Between 2001 and 2013, China successively became the world’s leading exporter of manufactured goods, one of the main recipients of foreign direct investment, the center of gravity of many industrial value chains, and then a growing technological competitor in strategic sectors.

This gradual rise in power also revealed the growing limits of the initial Western assumptions. Far from leading to a dilution of the strategic state, international integration paradoxically contributed to strengthening the financial, technological and industrial capacities of the Chinese system. As Scott Kennedy summarizes, « engagement has not transformed China into a liberal market economy; This has helped to create a much more efficient state capitalist system. »^[12]

It was precisely this combination of international openness and the consolidation of technologically directed administered capitalism that would gradually lead China to develop, during the 2000s and 2010s, an industrial policy of unprecedented scope, originality and sophistication.

B. The Rise of Industrial Policy Instruments: Strategic Planning, Financial Support and Consolidation of National Champions

While China’s accession  to the World Trade Organization has been a powerful accelerator of growth, it was never intended by the Chinese authorities as a mechanism for abandoning state economic leadership. On the contrary, international openness was gradually integrated into a much broader strategy of industrial modernization, technological catch-up and securing national power. Far from reducing the capacity for public intervention, integration into globalization has enabled the Chinese State to considerably increase its financial resources, its administrative capacities and its instruments of economic coordination.

This development is undoubtedly one of the main misunderstandings that have marked Sino-Western economic relations since the early 2000s. While a significant part of the developed economies was pursuing a movement of liberalization, relative deindustrialization and fragmentation of production chains, China was methodically strengthening the strategic management capacities of its economy. As Barry Naughton points out, « China has gradually built one of the most ambitious and comprehensive industrial policy systems ever implemented in a major economy. »^[13]

This architecture is not based on a single instrument but on a particularly dense combination of complementary levers: five-year planning, bank credit control, targeted subsidies, massive infrastructure support, public funding for research, local content policies, strategic public enterprises, public procurement, technology transfers, foreign investment control and technical standardization policies. The specificity of the Chinese system lies precisely in this capacity for transversal coordination between political institutions, public banks, sectoral administrations, local governments and large industrial groups.

In this perspective, the five-year plans continue to occupy a central place. Contrary to the image sometimes conveyed in the West of purely formal or symbolic planning, these are real instruments for the strategic prioritization of national industrial and technological priorities. As Sebastian Heilmann explains, Chinese economic governance is based on a model of « hierarchically directed experimentation », combining central orientation and local adaptation.^[14]

The 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010), and especially the 12th Plan (2011-2015), marked an essential step in this respect. The Chinese authorities gradually identified several sectors considered strategic for industrial upgrading: information technology, telecommunications, aeronautics, renewable energy, railway equipment, emerging artificial intelligence, biotechnology, semiconductors and electric vehicles. This logic of sectoral targeting would later prefigure the much more assertive ambitions of the Made in China 2025 program.

The policy of financial support also played a decisive role in this acceleration. Unlike Western economies where capital allocation is based primarily on private financial markets, China’s banking system remains largely dominated by large state-owned banks that are closely coordinated with national priorities. This structure allows the Chinese authorities to direct credit massively towards sectors considered strategic, even when their immediate profitability appears uncertain.

As Nicholas Lardy observes, this ability to direct funding is one of the main pillars of Chinese administered capitalism.^[15] Large state-owned banks, sovereign wealth funds, local investment vehicles and development banks have thus enabled the massive financing of infrastructure, industrial capacity, technological programmes, urbanisation policies and export strategies. The scale of the investments made during the 2000s and 2010s appears to have no recent historical equivalent. The development of rail, port, energy and digital infrastructure has profoundly transformed the country’s productive capacities while supporting the integration of the Chinese domestic market. This dynamic also allowed China to rapidly consolidate its economies of industrial scale and to encourage the emergence of groups capable of gradually competing with large Western and Japanese companies.

The role of public enterprises remains central in this regard. Contrary to the expectations expressed at the time of accession to the WTO, the large Chinese public groups have by no means disappeared. On the contrary, they have undergone a process of restructuring, consolidation and sometimes accelerated internationalization. The Chinese authorities have gradually sought to transform several state-owned enterprises into true « national champions » capable of supporting the country’s industrial and geopolitical objectives.

As Scott Kennedy points out, the logic pursued does not necessarily consist in artificially protecting inefficient companies, but in promoting the emergence of industrial capacities considered strategic in the long term.^[16] This approach differs profoundly from the European tradition of competition policy, which has historically been more suspicious of state-sponsored industrial concentrations.

The example of the rail sector is a particular illustration of this dynamic. Through a combination of technology transfers, public procurement, massive public funding and industrial consolidation, China has managed to build the world’s largest high-speed rail network in less than two decades while creating groups such as CRRC Corporation that can compete directly with Western and Japanese manufacturers in international markets.

The same logic appears in telecommunications, renewable energies or electric batteries. The rise of groups such as Huawei, ZTE or more recently BYD cannot be understood in isolation from this systemic environment combining public funding, relative protection of the domestic market, regulatory support, massive investments in research and development, public procurement and an internationalization strategy.

This link between industrial policy and technological sovereignty was further strengthened after the global financial crisis of 2008. This was perceived by the Chinese authorities as confirmation of the relative fragility of Western economies and the need for China to accelerate its industrial move upmarket in order to reduce its technological dependence. As Zheng Yongnian notes, the 2008 crisis profoundly reinforced among the Chinese elites the idea that the global economic center of gravity was shifting permanently towards Asia.^[17]

At the same time, Western economies gradually began to perceive the destabilizing effects of this industrial rise. Debates about Chinese overcapacity, forced technology transfers, public subsidies, and asymmetric competition multiplied in the United States and Europe. Several European industrial sectors — steel, solar, chemicals, industrial equipment — were confronted with Chinese competition on an unprecedented scale.

This situation gradually brought to light a major structural difference between China and the European Union. While China had a strong capacity for strategic coordination between industrial policy, financing, foreign trade and competition, Europe remained largely organised around a logic of institutional fragmentation, budgetary discipline and control of state aid. As Mario Draghi would later point out, this asymmetry of resources and decision-making speed is now one of the main factors in Europe’s technological stall.^[18]

Thus, far from having produced a gradual alignment with Western standards, China’s integration into the world economy has contributed to the consolidation of an original model of technologically directed administered capitalism. This model is based less on the substitution of the market by the state than on their strategic articulation in the pursuit of long-term industrial, technological and geopolitical power objectives.

C. The 2007 anti-monopoly law: the emergence of a competition law at the service of economic and technological power

China  ‘s adoption of its first major anti-monopoly law in August 2007, which came into force on August 1, 2008, was one of the major legal events in China’s contemporary economic transformation. Long awaited by international observers, this reform was generally interpreted, in Western economies, as a further sign of China’s gradual rapprochement with the competitive standards of the major market economies. However, as several doctrinal analyses have shown, the specificity of Chinese competition law lies precisely in its insertion within a much broader architecture of industrial policy, economic security and power strategy, as we have just recalled in an extensive way in our analysis recently published in the Diplomate Média.^[19]

The first Western doctrinal commentaries immediately underlined the hybrid nature of the new Chinese system. Inspired by the experiences of the United States, Europe, Germany and Japan, China’s antimonopoly law incorporated several classic instruments of contemporary competition law: merger control, prohibition of cartels, the fight against abuses of dominant position and the supervision of administrative restrictions on competition. However, behind this formal proximity to the major Western systems, the goals pursued appeared significantly broader and more ambiguous, very authentically Chinese.

This singularity emerges from the reading of the objectives officially assigned to the law. Where the American and European traditions have historically privileged, according to varying intensities, consumer protection, economic efficiency or the proper functioning of the internal market, the Chinese anti-monopoly law of 2007 explicitly places competition law in a broader purpose of national economic policy. Article 1 states that the law aims not only to « prevent and prevent monopolistic behaviour« , but also to « protect fair competition in the market« , « improve economic efficiency« , « safeguard the interests of consumers and the public social interest« , and « promote the healthy development of the socialist market economy ». This wording reveals from the outset a conception of competition law that is closely linked to the general objectives of economic stability, industrial modernization and national power.^[20] Competition therefore never appears as an autonomous value; it remains well integrated into a larger set of economic, social, industrial and political considerations.

As Harry First observes, Chinese competition law has developed in an environment where the state retains a structural place in the organization of the economy, which necessarily leads to a particular articulation between competitive logic and national strategic objectives.^[21] This specificity largely explains why China’s competition policy cannot be analysed in isolation from the industrial and technological priorities defined by the central authorities.

The very process of drafting the law bears witness to this hybridization. The preparatory debates revealed very early on the significant tensions between several sometimes contradictory objectives: economic opening, modernization of the internal market, control of administrative monopolies, protection of national companies, attractiveness of foreign investment and preservation of Chinese strategic interests. As Angela Huyue Zhang points out, Chinese competition law was born out of a complex compromise between the requirements of economic modernization and the persistent desire to preserve the state’s ability to intervene.^[22]

This structural ambiguity quickly became apparent in the decision-making practice of the Chinese authorities. During the first years of the law’s application, several decisions concerning operations involving large foreign groups gave rise to important international debates. The Coca-Cola/China Huiyuan Juice Group, Google, Qualcomm  and certain investigations targeting Western technology groups gradually fuelled criticism of a possible strategic instrumentalisation of competition law.

The 2009 ban on  Coca-Cola’s planned acquisition of Huiyuan was a major symbolic turning point in this regard. Officially motivated by classic competition concerns, this decision was widely interpreted abroad as revealing the Chinese authorities’ desire to protect certain national companies deemed strategic. It also marked the gradual emergence of a form of competitive economic sovereignty in which merger control could become an instrument of industrial policy and economic security.

At the same time, the Chinese authorities gradually developed a more aggressive approach towards large technology companies, particularly in the telecommunications, digital and platform sectors. The investigations launched against Qualcomm in the mid-2010s particularly illustrated this evolution. Beyond the classic issues related to intellectual property licenses and abuses of dominant position, these proceedings were also part of a much broader context of Chinese technological rise and the desire to reduce dependence on foreign technologies.

As Mark Wu points out, the traditional categories of Western competition law sometimes appear insufficient to understand a system in which competitive, industrial, technological and geopolitical considerations remain closely intertwined.^[23] This situation largely contributes to the persistent misunderstandings between China and Western economies in the field of international economic law.

The role of state-owned enterprises also illustrates this singularity of the Chinese model. While Western systems have historically tended to view state-supported economic concentration situations with suspicion, the Chinese authorities have gradually integrated several large state-owned groups into their strategy of industrial and technological upgrading. Competition policy in China has therefore never pursued a general objective of dismantling public dominant positions comparable to certain American antitrust traditions.

On the contrary, several sectors considered strategic — energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, rail transport, defense, finance or digital — continued to be structured around major groups closely linked to national priorities. As Barry Naughton points out, the contemporary Chinese economy is not based on the disappearance of the entrepreneurial state but on its transformation into a strategic player in global competition.^[24]

This orientation has been further accentuated with the coming to power of Xi Jinping. Competition policy was gradually reinserted into a broader logic of national security, technological sovereignty and strategic control of sectors deemed essential. At the same time, the Chinese authorities sought to control certain private concentrations considered likely to escape central political control, to strengthen national technological capacities, to secure strategic data, to reduce external dependencies in critical sectors, and to preserve economic, political, and social stability in a context marked by intensifying international technological and commercial rivalries.^[25]

The major campaigns launched from 2020 onwards against several Chinese digital platforms such as Alibaba Group or Tencent cannot be understood exclusively from the traditional perspective of competition law. They also reflect the desire of central authorities to reassert their control over private players that have become extremely powerful in the fields of data, digital payment, e-commerce or technological infrastructure.

As Angela Huyue Zhang explains, contemporary Chinese competition regulation now tends to merge economic considerations, political control, digital sovereignty and technological strategy.^[26] This evolution profoundly distinguishes the Chinese model from the European and American approaches, even if the latter are themselves experiencing a growing return of concerns about economic security and technological sovereignty.

In this context, Chinese competition law appears less as an instrument of progressive economic liberalization than as one of the components of a broader architecture of technologically directed administered capitalism. Its evolution since 2007 thus illustrates the way in which China has gradually integrated the instruments of contemporary economic law into a general strategy of industrial, technological and geopolitical power.

This trajectory also sheds light on the growing difficulties faced by the European Union. While European competition policy is still largely structured around the principles of competitive neutrality and state aid discipline, China has gradually built a system in which competition, industrial policy, technological sovereignty and economic security are part of the same integrated strategic logic. This differential in systemic coherence is now one of the main issues in contemporary economic rivalries.

II – The rise of a systemic industrial policy (2013-2020)

Xi Jinping’s rise to power marks a decisive break in the evolution of the contemporary Chinese economic model. While the previous decades had already seen the emergence of a close link between international openness, industrial policy and state control, the period opened from 2013 onwards is characterised by a considerable deepening of this systemic logic. Industrial policy gradually ceased to appear as a simple instrument of economic modernization among others; it is becoming one of the central pillars of China’s national security, technological sovereignty and geopolitical strategy.

This transformation is taking place in a profoundly changed international context. The global financial crisis of 2008 had already contributed to weakening Western confidence in the self-regulatory mechanisms of liberal globalization. At the same time, the acceleration of China’s technological rise, growing trade tensions with the United States, and new vulnerabilities in global supply chains gradually led the Chinese authorities to reassess the place of economic security in the national strategy.

As Barry Naughton observes, China is then entering a phase of much  more ambitious and centralized « techno-industrial policy« , in which industrial, technological, military and geopolitical objectives are now tending to merge.^[27] This is reflected in an increased centralization of economic power around the Chinese Communist Party, a strengthening of strategic planning, a massive financial mobilization in favor of critical sectors and an explicit desire to reduce external technological dependencies.

From this perspective, competition is no longer seen as an autonomous mechanism for regulating markets but as one of the instruments of a general strategy of power. Competition law, digital policies, technical standards, data control, cybersecurity policies and restrictions on foreign investment are now part of an integrated architecture aimed at strengthening China’s industrial and technological resilience.

This second part will first analyze the doctrinal and political turning point under the authority of Xi Jinping, marked by the emergence of a true techno-nationalism articulating economic security, strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty (A). It will then examine the Made in China 2025  program and the identification of the main strategic sectors that will support China’s industrial upgrade (B). Finally, it will study the contemporary instruments of this systemic industrial policy: subsidies and public funding, the role of public companies and national champions, the mastery of standards and digital data, as well as the increasing use of competition law as a strategic instrument of economic and technological control (C).

A. Xi Jinping’s turning point: technological sovereignty and economic security

Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012-2013 was one of the major turning points in contemporary Chinese economic and political history. Without breaking with the fundamental orientations initiated since the period of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the new Chinese leadership gradually engaged in a profound political and strategic recentralization aimed at strengthening the Communist Party’s control over the main levers of economic, technological and financial power.

This evolution stems from an observation shared by a significant part of the Chinese elite: in a context marked by the intensification of international rivalries, technological, financial or digital dependencies now constitute major strategic vulnerabilities. Industrial policy could therefore no longer be conceived solely as an instrument of economic growth; it was to become a central element of national security and long-term sovereignty.

As Sebastian Heilmann points out, the Chinese system then evolved into a form of « integrated strategic governance » in which the Party, the state, large state-owned enterprises, financial institutions and regulatory authorities participated in common objectives of technological and industrial empowerment.^[28] This logic differs profoundly from Western models based on a clearer separation between economic policy, national security and competitive regulation.

The centralization of power is one of the essential dimensions of this transformation. Under Xi Jinping, several Communist Party organs are strengthening their direct role in overseeing industrial, technological and financial policies. At the same time, strategic public enterprises are seeing their articulation with national priorities strengthened. The boundary between economic and political governance is thus becoming increasingly porous.

This development is accompanied by a growing fusion of national security, industrial policy and technological strategy. The Chinese authorities now explicitly consider semiconductors, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, data or telecommunications as sectors that are directly related to the nation’s fundamental interests. As Rush Doshi notes, China is gradually developing a global conception of power in which technological mastery now conditions strategic autonomy and the capacity for international influence.^[29]

The trade and technology war with the United States from 2018 onwards further accentuated this dynamic. U.S. restrictions on Huawei in particular, limitations on access to advanced semiconductors, and export controls definitively convinced the Chinese authorities of the need to accelerate the reduction of external dependencies in critical technologies. This evolution favoured the emergence of a real doctrine of strategic technological autonomy.

It was in this context that the so-called « dual circulation » strategy gradually appeared. Officially formulated in 2020 but prepared in previous years, this doctrine aims to rebalance the Chinese economic model around the domestic market, national innovation and the securing of strategic supply chains, while maintaining international integration when it remains favourable to Chinese interests. Globalization is no longer rejected, but is now subordinated to the imperatives of national resilience and technological sovereignty.

As Michael Pillsbury explains, a growing part of Chinese strategic thinking considers that contemporary international competition is mainly played out in the technological, industrial and information fields.^[30] This perception largely contributes to the importance given to policies to support critical sectors and to the desire to control digital infrastructures, data flows and international technological standards.

The development of Chinese techno-nationalism is one of the most visible manifestations of this evolution. This is not limited to a simple national economic preference; it is based on the conviction that mastery of critical technologies directly conditions China’s political sovereignty, national security and international standing in the twenty-first century. Public policies therefore seek to promote the emergence of national technological ecosystems capable of competing with the major Western powers.

This orientation appears explicitly in several official Chinese texts relating to cybersecurity, data security, artificial intelligence or industrial modernization. Speeches published in the  People’s Daily now regularly insist on the need to build a « modern industrial system », secure strategic supply chains, and strengthen national capacities for independent innovation.^[31]

At the same time, competition policy was gradually reintegrated into this broader strategic architecture. At the same time, the Chinese authorities sought to limit certain private concentrations considered likely to escape central political control, to strengthen national technological capacities, to secure strategic data, to reduce external dependencies in critical sectors, and to preserve economic and social stability. The major investigations launched against several Chinese digital platforms from 2020 onwards illustrate this desire to rearticulate competitive discipline, political control and technological sovereignty.

As Angela Huyue Zhang points out, contemporary Chinese economic regulation now tends to merge industrial policy, national security, data control and governance of digital platforms.^[32] This evolution profoundly distinguishes the Chinese model from traditional European approaches, which have historically focused more on competitive neutrality and the limitation of public aid.

This divergence contributes today to one of the main contemporary strategic debates: are the legal and economic instruments developed by liberal democracies during the globalization of the 1990s still adapted to powers capable of simultaneously mobilizing industrial policy, public finance, digital regulation, national security and technological control in an integrated long-term strategy?

B. « Made in China 2025 » and strategic sectors: technology planning at the service of power

The official announcement of the Made in China 2025  program in May 2015 is one of the most revealing moments in the evolution of China’s economic strategy under Xi Jinping. Much more than a simple sectoral plan for industrial modernization, this program marks the explicit affirmation of a global technological ambition:  to reduce China’s dependence on foreign technologies, secure critical value chains and to bring out national champions capable of dominating several strategic industries of the twenty-first century. Surprisingly, this agenda was largely ignored in the decade 2015-2025 by Western leaders, especially the Europeans. Sooner or later, history will judge these leaders responsible for an industrial, strategic bankruptcy, with an unprecedented dropout, so as not to qualify this failure in an even worse way.

For many Western observers, especially Americans, however, the program revealed with unprecedented clarity the systemic dimension of contemporary Chinese industrial policy. While previous decades had often made it possible to maintain a certain ambiguity between market logic and state management, Made in China 2025 now openly assumed the objective of national technological empowerment. As Scott Kennedy points out, this was less a simple industrial program than a structural transformation strategy aimed at repositioning China at the top of global value chains. This industrial strategy program has been particularly analyzed in detail, with finesse and rigor by the United States’ commercial and industrial representatives in China.^[33]

Inspired in part by the German experiences of  » Industry 4.0 « , but developed on an unparalleled financial, administrative and political scale, the programme was based on several closely articulated objectives: industrial automation, national innovation, technological substitution, qualitative improvement of production, mastery of international technical standards and reduction of external dependencies in critical sectors.

The central ambition was to move China from an economy historically based on cost competitiveness to a model dominated by technological innovation, industrial sophistication and the mastery of disruptive technologies. This transformation responded to several simultaneous imperatives: a gradual slowdown in extensive growth, rising labour costs, an ageing population, growing geopolitical tensions and technological vulnerabilities revealed by dependencies on foreign suppliers.

Semiconductors quickly occupied a central place in this strategy. The Chinese authorities considered external dependence in advanced components to be one of the country’s main structural weaknesses. U.S. restrictions on certain Chinese tech companies further reinforced this perception. Significant public investment was thus directed towards the development of a national microchip industry, mobilizing sovereign wealth funds, public banks, provincial subsidies and targeted support policies.

As Chris Miller explains, the competition over semiconductors is now one of the main theaters of the Sino-American strategic rivalry.^[34] The mastery of advanced production capacities conditions not only the economic power, but also the military, digital and informational capabilities of the great contemporary powers.

Artificial intelligence also became a major focus of China’s strategy. As early as 2017, China’s State Council adopted a national artificial intelligence development plan explicitly aimed at making China the world’s leading AI innovation hub by 2030. This policy benefits from a particularly favourable environment combining massive access to data, considerable public support, an integrated digital ecosystem and strong coordination between public authorities, universities and major technology platforms.

In electric vehicles and batteries, China pursued a particularly coherent and anticipatory strategy. Through a combination of public subsidies, support for domestic demand, partial control of critical supply chains, and massive investments in industrial capacity, it has gradually become the dominant player in several key segments of the global energy transition. The spectacular growth of groups such as BYD and CATL illustrates this capacity for long-term industrial planning.

This dynamic goes far beyond commercial logic alone. As Adam Tooze points out, the global energy transition is also a new space for geo-economic competition in which the control of batteries, critical materials and energy infrastructure is becoming a central factor of power.^[35]

Industrial robotics, biotechnology, aeronautical equipment and telecommunications were also identified as priority sectors. In each of these areas, China’s strategy combines several complementary instruments: massive public funding, technology transfers, regulatory support, public procurement, development of national standards and relative protection of the domestic market.

The case of telecommunications appears to be particularly emblematic. Huawei’s rise in 5G infrastructure gradually transformed an industrial issue into a global geopolitical issue. The debates on network security, digital sovereignty and the control of critical infrastructures are a perfect illustration of how strategic technologies are now tending to merge with national security issues.

As Rush Doshi points out, the Chinese authorities explicitly consider the mastery of critical technologies as one of the essential conditions for the rebalancing of global power in favor of China.^[36] This logic largely explains the extent of the resources mobilized in favor of strategic technological sectors.

The European Union, by contrast, appears to have long remained much more hesitant in the development of an integrated technological industrial policy. While several European initiatives have gradually emerged in semiconductors, batteries and artificial intelligence, Europe is still characterised by significant institutional fragmentation, more limited budgetary capacities and an often incomplete articulation between industrial policy, trade policy and competition policy.

This asymmetry contributes to the growing debate on the adaptation of the European competition framework – called for by Mario Draghi – with extremely rational and strategic pressing arguments but little or poorly implemented, especially in France – in the face of the massive industrial strategies deployed by China and, more recently, by the United States itself through programs such as the Inflation Reduction Act or the CHIPS and Science Act.

Beyond economic instruments alone, Made in China 2025 reveals more deeply the transformation of China’s industrial policy into a true strategy of integrated technological power. The traditional boundaries between industry, innovation, national security, competition and geopolitics are gradually blurring in favour of a systemic vision of economic sovereignty.^[37] This evolution contributes directly to the current reconfiguration of world power relations. It also forces Western economies to rethink several postulates inherited from the liberal globalization of previous decades: market neutrality, separation between industrial policy and competition, and the relative autonomy of private actors vis-à-vis long-term state strategies.^[38]

C. Contemporary instruments of a systemic industrial policy

The effectiveness of China’s contemporary industrial policy does not lie solely in setting ambitious strategic goals; It is also based on the mobilisation of a particularly dense and coordinated set of financial, regulatory, technological and competitive instruments. It is precisely this capacity for systemic articulation between public institutions, companies, finance, digital regulation and industrial strategy that distinguishes the Chinese model today from more fragmented Western approaches.

While liberal economies have long tended to separate industrial policy, competition law, financial regulation and national security, China is gradually developing an integrated model in which these different instruments are part of the same logic of economic and technological power. As Barry Naughton points out, contemporary China is characterized less by a simple « return of the state » than by the emergence of a true « techno-industrial developing state » capable of simultaneously coordinating finance, innovation, regulation and geopolitical strategy.^[39]

1. Subsidies, Public Funding, and Administered Capitalism

Public funding is one of the essential pillars of this industrial architecture. Unlike Western economies, which are largely dominated by private financial markets, the Chinese system retains a strong capacity for administrative orientation of capital. Large state-owned banks, sovereign wealth funds, local investment vehicles and specialized industrial funds allow central and provincial authorities to channel resources massively into sectors deemed strategic.

This financial mobilization capacity has reached an exceptional scale in semiconductors, batteries, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and green technologies. The  » guidance funds  » created from the mid-2010s onwards play a central role in this respect. These industry-oriented funds combine national public capital, provincial funding and sometimes private investment to support the development of priority technology ecosystems.

As Nicholas Lardy points out, this structure allows the Chinese authorities to support massive investments over long-term horizons that are sometimes incompatible with the requirements of immediate profitability of Western markets.^[40] Even when some projects prove to be inefficient or oversized, the system retains a remarkable capacity for rapid redeployment of resources and industrial learning.

Provincial and local governments also play a fundamental role in this dynamic. Competition between Chinese provinces to attract strategic industries, research centers and technological investments is fueling a form of supervised administrative competition that is helping to accelerate the industrialization of several priority sectors. As Sebastian Heilmann explains, this articulation between local experimentation and central coordination is one of the major singularities of the Chinese model.^[41]

However, the scale of this support is causing significant international trade tensions. The United States, the European Union and several trading partners regularly denounce the distorting effects of Chinese subsidies, particularly in steel, solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and industrial equipment. These criticisms reflect more broadly the difficulties of the contemporary multilateral trade framework in understanding industrial strategies of this magnitude.

2. Public Enterprises, Sector Consolidation and National Champions

The role of state-owned enterprises also remains central to China’s contemporary political economy. Contrary to expectations at the time of accession to the World Trade Organization, large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have not disappeared as a result of economic liberalization; on the contrary, they have been restructured, consolidated and integrated into national strategic priorities.

This development reflects a particular conception of industrial competition. The Chinese authorities do not necessarily consider economic concentration to be a problem in itself when it makes it possible to strengthen domestic technological capacities, increase economies of scale or support the international competitiveness of Chinese groups. In several sectors considered strategic – energy, railways, shipbuilding, defence, digital infrastructure or aeronautics – industrial consolidation has been explicitly encouraged by the central authorities.

The emergence of groups such as CRRC Corporation in the rail sector, COMAC in aeronautics and State Grid Corporation of China in energy infrastructure illustrates this strategy of directed concentration. As Scott Kennedy points out, China is less interested in multiplying competing players than in creating groups capable of competing on a global scale in critical sectors.^[42]

This approach is in stark contrast to European competition policy traditions, which have historically been more reticent about state-backed mergers. The Siemens/Alstom  affair has particularly illustrated this doctrinal divergence between the logic of the internal market and the logic of industrial power.

3. Standards, data and digital sovereignty

Mastering technical standards, digital infrastructure and data flows is now another essential pillar of China’s industrial strategy. The Chinese authorities consider that technological standards, cybersecurity and data control represent major issues of economic and geopolitical sovereignty.

This orientation has resulted in the gradual adoption of a particularly dense legislative package in the digital and data fields. The Data Security Law adopted in 2021, the Personal Information Protection Law and cybersecurity regulations considerably strengthen the Chinese authorities’ supervisory capabilities over strategic data and digital infrastructure.

As Samm Sacks observes, China’s model of digital governance is based on a close articulation between national security, industrial development and data control.^[43] Information flows are no longer considered as simple private economic assets but as strategic resources directly related to the fundamental interests of the State.

This logic is also part of a broader strategy of international technological standardization. China is now actively seeking to influence global standards in telecommunications, artificial intelligence, smart grids, digital infrastructure or green technologies. Contemporary technological competition is therefore no longer solely about products or industrial capacities, but also about defining the technical rules that will structure future world markets.

At the same time, the Chinese authorities have gradually developed their own export control and technological restriction mechanisms, particularly in rare earths, certain critical materials or sensitive technologies. This development reflects the gradual transformation of economic interdependencies into potential instruments of geopolitical power.

4. Competition law as a strategic instrument of governance

Competition law itself has gradually been integrated into this systemic architecture. The major investigations launched from 2020 onwards against several Chinese digital platforms are a particular illustration of this development. The proceedings against Alibaba Group, Tencent or Meituancannot be analysed exclusively through the classic categories of Western competition law.

These interventions simultaneously pursued several objectives: limiting private dominant positions, protecting consumers, controlling strategic data, reducing systemic financial risks, and reasserting the political authority of the Communist Party over the big tech companies. As Angela Huyue Zhang points out, China’s regulation of digital platforms is now tending to merge competition, cybersecurity, data governance and political stability^[44]. The suspension  of Ant Group‘s IPO in 2020, which received a lot of media coverage at the time, followed by the arrest of Chinese founder and billionaire Jack Ma, is a particularly revealing moment in this regard.^[45] This decision reflected less a simple competitive concern than a broader desire to regain control over private players that had become central to China’s financial and digital infrastructure.

This evolution illustrates more broadly the specificity of the contemporary Chinese model: competition is never an autonomous end but an instrument among others in the service of political stability, technological sovereignty and national power strategy. This logic differs profoundly from the classic European conceptions based on competitive neutrality and the relative autonomy of the market.

Thus, China’s contemporary industrial policy cannot be understood as a juxtaposition of isolated sectoral measures. It is based on a particularly deep integration between public finance, strategic planning, technological governance, regulatory control and competition policy. This systemic coherence is undoubtedly one of the main factors explaining the speed of China’s industrial and technological rise since the early 2010s — and, correlatively, the growing concern it has caused in the major Western economies.

III – The fragmentation of the global economic model: Western reactions, the return of industrial policies and the crisis of the liberal competitive paradigm

China’s industrial and technological rise has gradually brought about a profound transformation of the contemporary international political economy. What still appeared, in the early 2000s, to be a process essentially based on economic interdependence and the growing integration of global markets is now tending to reconfigure itself around logics of strategic rivalry, technological sovereignty and the securing of critical value chains.

The liberal globalization that emerged in the 1990s was largely based on several structuring postulates: the primacy of economic efficiency, the relative geopolitical neutrality of trade, the international fragmentation of production chains, and the growing autonomy of markets in relation to state strategies. However, the rise of China has gradually called into question each of these balances. The emergence of a technologically directed administered capitalism, capable of simultaneously mobilizing industrial policy, public finance, digital regulation, and geopolitical strategy, has led major Western economies to reassess their own economic and competitive doctrines.

As Dani Rodrik points out, the contemporary return of industrial policies reflects less a cyclical parenthesis than a structural transformation of the world economy, in which states seek to regain control over technologies, infrastructures and strategic dependencies.^[46] This evolution is now manifesting itself in both the United States and the European Union, even if the institutional responses remain profoundly different.

The United States has thus embarked on a particularly spectacular turn, combining technological restrictions, export controls, massive industrial subsidies and a reinterpretation of its antitrust doctrine in a context of systemic rivalry with China (A). At the same time, the European Union, which was later and more divided, is trying to adapt its competition framework and its industrial policies in order to limit the risk of technological and industrial stalling (B). Finally, these transformations contribute to the emergence of a new fragmented economic order in which economic security, critical technologies, and supply chains become central objects of geopolitical competition (C).

A. The American Turn: Economic Security, Industrial Policy, and the Redefinition of Antitrust

The U.S. response to China’s rise to power is probably one of the most important doctrinal shifts in U.S. political economy since the end of the Cold War. Long based on a relatively liberal vision of globalization and on the conviction that economic integration would gradually promote the convergence of economic and political models, American strategy is now moving towards a much more explicitly geopolitical and techno-industrial logic.

This shift can be explained first of all by the growing perception of an American industrial and technological stall in certain strategic sectors. The loss of manufacturing jobs, dependence on Asian supply chains, the concentration of some critical industrial capacity in China, and the technology transfers accumulated since the 2000s gradually fueled a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington.

As Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security adviser, observes, the United States has for too long prioritized short-term economic efficiency to the detriment of industrial resilience and technological security, influencing the members of the European Commission and its main strategic administrations in the same wrong direction as well as the judges of the European Court of Justice.^[47] This criticism marks a significant break with several decades of American economic doctrine largely dominated by the principles of deregulation, trade openness and the limitation of federal industrial intervention.

Donald Trump’s administration was an accentuation of the rupture that had in fact been drawn since the Obama administration. With the Trump I and especially Trump II administrations, the massive tariffs imposed on Chinese products, the restrictions on Huawei, the reinforced controls on foreign investment by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and the first restrictions on the export of sensitive technologies reflected the emergence of a much more confrontational approach to Sino-American economic relations.

However, far from disappearing with Joe Biden’s arrival in power, this dynamic was on the contrary deepened and systematized. The Biden administration retained most of the trade restrictions on China while developing a much more coherent strategy of industrial technology policy, reinforced by the Trump II administration. As Kurt Campbell points out, the Sino-American rivalry is now perceived in Washington as a long-term competition directly related to the industrial, technological and scientific capacities of the two powers.^[48]

This evolution materialized in particular through several major texts such as the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 or the Inflation Reduction Actalready mentioned. These programs mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, tax credits, and public funding to support industrial relocation, semiconductors, batteries, green technology, and critical infrastructure.

The scale of these interventions marks a historic break in a country that has long been reluctant to any explicit form of federal industrial policy. As Jennifer Harris points out, the United States is now rediscovering the instruments of economic power that it itself helped to marginalize during decades of liberal globalization.^[49]

The technological issue occupies a central place in this strategy. U.S. controls on exports of advanced semiconductors, restrictions on lithographic equipment and limitations on certain scientific cooperation show an explicit desire to slow down Chinese capabilities in several critical technologies. As Chris Miller explains, semiconductors are now the « invisible strategic infrastructure » of contemporary power.^[50] Their mastery directly conditions the military, digital, industrial and informational capabilities of the great powers.

This development also has a profound impact on US competition law. Under the impetus of officials such as Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission or Jonathan Kanter at the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice, American antitrust is gradually tending to go beyond the strictly consumerist framework inherited from the Chicago School. The new American antitrust debates now include more the issues of economic concentration, industrial resilience, innovation, strategic dependence and the structural power of the major digital platforms. Without reviving the structural antitrust of the early twentieth century, this evolution nevertheless marks a significant move away from the paradigm focused exclusively on short-term price effects.

At the same time, several influential American thinkers now consider that competition policy can no longer be thought of in isolation from global geopolitical competition. As Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, points out,  an excessively restrictive antitrust policy could paradoxically weaken the ability of American companies to face competitors massively supported by foreign states.^[51]

However, this doctrinal reorientation remains marked by significant internal tensions. Part of the American antitrust tradition remains attached to limiting economic concentrations and fighting against the power of large technology platforms, while another insists more on the need to preserve American geopolitical competitiveness vis-à-vis China.

These contradictions reflect more broadly the ambiguities of the contemporary period: Western economies are simultaneously seeking to limit the excesses of private concentration while rebuilding industrial capacities capable of competing with highly integrated state systems. The American case thus appears to be one of the most revealing laboratories of the current recomposition of the relationship between competition, industry and geopolitics.

B. The European Union and the Chinese challenge: between industrial awakening, competitive constraints and strategic fragmentation

At the specifically legal and regulatory level (differentiated from the Atlanticist economic inspiration of its decisions), the European Union has long approached economic globalisation from a fundamentally different perspective from that of the United States or China. While Washington maintained, even during the decades of economic liberalization, a strong strategic culture of power and Beijing gradually developed a technologically directed administered capitalism, Europe favored mainly a normative approach based on trade openness, competitive discipline and legal regulation of the internal market, respecting economically the guidelines of what has been called the « Consensus of the Consensus ». Washington. »

This European normative singularity – which will largely persist in 2026 – has its roots in the very construction of the community project. Since the origins of the European Economic Community, competition law has been conceived primarily as an instrument for the integration of the internal market designed to prevent national fragmentation, distortive State aid and mergers which might impede the free movement of the economy. As Mario Monti recalled, European competition policy was historically thought of as an  » economic constitution of the internal market« , as in the United States for antitrust law considered as a real « economic constitution », rather than as a tool of geopolitical power.^[52]

This approach produced several undeniable successes: deepening the single market, consumer protection, limiting cartels and regulating public aid. However, it also contributed to establishing a form of dissociation between competition policy, industrial policy and geo-economic strategy at the very time when the competing great powers were developing much more integrated strategies.

For a long time, Europe considered that global trade openness, the spread of multilateral rules and growing economic integration would be enough to guarantee its long-term prosperity. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization was widely supported by the European institutions in the hope of a gradual convergence towards Western economic and legal standards.

However, the acceleration of China’s industrial and technological rise gradually revealed the structural weaknesses of the European model. In several critical sectors – batteries, semiconductors, cloud, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, telecoms infrastructure or green technologies – Europe appeared increasingly dependent on American or Asian players. This dependence raised growing concerns about the risk of industrial and technological marginalization of the continent.

As Jean Pisani-Ferry points out, Europe is today confronted with a fundamental tension between its historical attachment to competitive openness and the growing – even alarming – need to preserve its strategic industrial capacities.^[53] This contradiction appears to be particularly visible in the field of critical technologies.

In  this respect, the Siemens/Alstom affair  of 2019 was a major moment of rupture in the European debate. The European Commission’s veto of the merger of the two railway groups sparked strong criticism in France and Germany, with several politicians believing that the strict application of competition law prevented the emergence of « European champions » capable of competing with large groups supported by third countries, particularly Chinese.

This controversy helped to accelerate an already emerging doctrinal debate on the adaptation of European competition rules in a context of global geo-economic rivalry. As Isabelle de Silva, former president of the French Competition Authority, has observed, competition policy can no longer be thought of independently of the issues of economic and technological sovereignty.^[54]

The health crisis of 2020 and then the growing geopolitical tensions with China and Russia further accelerated this awareness. Component shortages, medical dependencies, energy vulnerabilities and logistical disruptions brutally revealed the fragilities of some European value chains.

In this context, several European industrial initiatives were gradually developed. The « Important Projects of Common European Interest » (IPCEI)in batteries, hydrogen or semiconductors show a growing desire for continental industrial coordination. The European Chips Act adopted in 2023 also aims to strengthen European capabilities in advanced semiconductors.

However, these initiatives often face several structural limitations: institutional fragmentation, dispersed fiscal capacities, divergences between Member States and the persistent burden of State aid control. Unlike China or the United States, the European Union does not have a real federal industrial budget capable of massively supporting long-term technological strategies.

As Mario Draghi points out in his report on European competitiveness officially presented in September 2024, the risk of a European technological stall has now become systemic.^[55] The report explicitly emphasises the inadequacy of European investment, the fragmentation of capital markets, the numerical backwardness and the difficulties in linking industrial policy and competition law.

In this respect, the Draghi report marks an important doctrinal development. For the first time with such clarity, a former president of the European Central Bank explicitly calls for a profound revision of several pillars of the European economic model: industrial policy, financing of innovation, integration of capital markets and interpretation of competition law.

However, this reorientation remains politically delicate. Several Member States – often aligned with classic Atlanticist positions – remain attached to a traditional conception of competition and fear that too much relaxation of European rules will mainly favour the large States with the largest budgetary margins, first and foremost Germany and France.

The issue of state aid is a particular illustration of this tension. Since the health crisis and the adoption of the US Inflation Reduction Act, the temporary easing granted by the Commission has mainly benefited the States with the highest budgetary capacities. This is fuelling growing concerns about the risk of fragmentation of the European internal market itself.

At the same time, the European Union is also trying to develop new trade defence instruments against Chinese strategies. The regulation on foreign subsidies, foreign investment screening mechanisms and anti-coercion instruments bear witness to a gradual rise in geopolitical concerns in European economic policy.

As Anu Bradford points out, however, Europe still faces a major structural challenge: it continues to exercise mainly « regulatory power » even as contemporary global competition increasingly relies on massive industrial, financial, and technological capabilities.^[56] This lack of normative strategic mobility is as much due to a form of technocratic routine on the part of the Commission’s very high-level agents, as to the fearful and reluctant reluctance to change of a certain number of pusillanimous Member States.   This tension is undoubtedly one of the central issues of the years to come. Can the European Union preserve the fundamental achievements of its competitive model while developing industrial instruments capable of responding to the rise of American and Chinese strategic capitalism? Or is it in danger, in the absence of sufficiently rapid and coordinated reform, a gradual weakening of its global industrial and technological position?

In any case, recent developments in European debates suggest that a major doctrinal transformation is now underway. It remains to be seen whether this change of direction will be deep, rapid and coherent enough to enable Europe to adapt to an international environment increasingly structured by technological and geopolitical rivalries.

C. Towards a New Fragmented Economic Order: Economic Security, Technological Blocs, and Sustainable Restoration of Power

The contemporary world economy now seems to be engaged in a structural transformation that goes far beyond the framework of Sino-American tensions. Since the late 2010s, international economic relations have gradually tended to move away from the paradigm of relatively integrated liberal globalization that dominated the post-Cold War era. The notions of economic security, technological sovereignty, industrial resilience and the control of strategic dependencies now occupy a central place in the public policies of the major powers.

This evolution does not necessarily mean the disappearance of globalization, but rather its reconfiguration around much more assertive geopolitical logics. As Henry Farrell points out, global economic interdependencies are no longer just vectors of integration and efficiency; they are also becoming potential instruments of coercion, influence, and power.^[57] Supply chains, digital networks, financial systems or technological infrastructures now appear as spaces of strategic competition.

China’s rise  plays a central role in this transformation. China’s ability to articulate industrial policy, public finance, technological control and geopolitical strategy has profoundly changed the Western perception of economic interdependencies. What was long perceived as a stabilizing factor has gradually become a source of strategic vulnerability.

The global health crisis of 2020 was a major accelerator of this awareness. Medical shortages, logistical disruptions, tensions over electronic components and energy supply difficulties have brutally revealed the degree of dependence of Western economies on certain value chains concentrated in Asia. This experience helped to put long-marginalized notions such as resilience, strategic stocks, and securing critical industrial capacities back at the heart of economic policies.

As Adam Tooze observes, the pandemic is revealing the fragilities accumulated by several decades of globalization based primarily on cost optimization and the international fragmentation of production.^[58] The major powers are now rediscovering the potential costs of over-reliance on foreign suppliers in critical sectors.

This evolution is particularly evident in advanced technologies. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, telecoms networks, batteries and rare earths are becoming central objects of geopolitical competition. States are gradually seeking to secure their supplies, control certain sensitive exports and develop national or allied industrial capacities.

The American notion of  » friend-shoring « , aimed at reorganizing certain supply chains around geopolitically reliable partners, illustrates this new logic.^[59] The objective is no longer only maximum economic efficiency but also the reduction of strategic vulnerabilities in an international environment perceived as more conflictual and less predictable.

This increasing fragmentation is also contributing to the emergence of partially competing technological blocs. US restrictions on certain advanced technologies, Chinese responses in rare earths or increasing controls on digital data reflect a gradual regionalisation of certain global technological infrastructures.

As Chris Miller points out, contemporary competition around semiconductors is a perfect illustration of this dynamic: technology value chains remain deeply globalized while simultaneously becoming increasingly politicized.^[60] Interdependencies persist, but they themselves become objects of strategic rivalry.

This development also profoundly affects international economic law. The rules drawn up within the framework of the World Trade Organization often appear ill-suited to massive industrial strategies that simultaneously mobilize subsidies, technological controls, digital standards, national security and state financial support. Multilateral procedures struggle to grasp hybrid economic models located on the border between the market and the strategy of power. As Mark Wu observes, the contemporary international trading system was largely designed to manage interactions between relatively comparable market economies, not competition between strategic capitalisms based on very different degrees of state intervention.^[61]

This transformation also contributes to changing traditional doctrines of competition law. In several major economies, competition is no longer thought of exclusively through the prism of the immediate well-being of the consumer or allocative efficiency; it is gradually tending to be rearticulated with the objectives of industrial resilience, technological sovereignty and national security. Debates on « national champions », strategic industrial concentrations, technological subsidies or restrictions on foreign investment reflect this doctrinal evolution. As Margrethe Vestager herself, who has long been a symbol of a rigorous and very political approach to European competition law, points out, the European Union must now learn to reconcile economic openness, innovation and strategic sovereignty.^[62]

However, the risk of a lasting fragmentation of the global economy remains considerable. Excessive technological barriers, trade restrictions and reshoring policies could lead to a sustained increase in production costs, significant economic inefficiencies and a slowdown in global innovation. Several economists point out that the world economy is probably entering an intermediate and hybrid phase: neither a complete return to the protectionism of the 1930s, nor a continuation of the hyper-integrated globalization of the 1990s and 2010s. As Richard Baldwin explains, states are now less interested in abandoning globalization than in « rewiring » it around new strategic priorities.^[63]

In this global recomposition, China occupies a singular position. It remains deeply integrated into world trade while simultaneously developing growing instruments of strategic autonomy and technological control. This duality is probably one of the central characteristics of the new emerging economic order: interdependence has not disappeared, but it is now permeated by permanent logics of geopolitical competition.

The current development thus marks the sustainable return of power to the heart of the world economy. The relative separation that seemed to have emerged after the Cold War between economic and strategic logic is gradually fading. Industry, finance, technology, data, competition and national security now appear as the different dimensions of the same systemic competition between great powers.

For the European Union, the stakes are particularly decisive. Situated between the American and Chinese strategic capitalisms, Europe must urgently determine whether it wishes to remain primarily a normative regulatory power or whether it also intends to become an industrial and technological power fully integrated into the new global geo-economic logics. Unfortunately, the debate did not take place during the last campaign for the 2024 European elections and neither did it take place during the investiture of the von der Leyen II Commission in November 2024. Only the presentations of Enrico Letta’s reports in April 2024 on the creation of a single capital market and especially the Draghi report on the need to redeploy European competitiveness in September 2024 have tried to shake off apathy in the face of the realities of Europe’s disengagement with the United States and China, particularly on the digital economy but also on the traditional industrial economy. China’s industrial strategy only further underlines this discrepancy, if need be. 

IV – A new synthesis between power, competition and security: towards a new geo-economic paradigm with Chinese leadership?

The evolution of China’s industrial policy since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 now goes far beyond the framework of China’s internal economic transformations. It has gradually contributed to a much deeper reconfiguration of contemporary international political economy, calling into question several of the fundamental postulates that had structured liberal globalization since the end of the Cold War.

For nearly three decades, the dominant paradigm of the major Western economies was based on a relative separation between economic and strategic logic. International trade should promote global efficiency; competition law had to preserve the proper functioning of the markets; the international fragmentation of value chains was seen as a factor of prosperity and geopolitical stabilization; and finally, growing economic interdependence was supposed to gradually reduce power rivalries. This intellectual and normative architecture appears today to be profoundly weakened.

China’s technological and industrial rise has been instrumental in this transformation. Beijing’s ability to articulate industrial policy, public financing, technological control, national security and geopolitical strategy has gradually led the major Western powers to reassess their own economic doctrines. As Dani Rodrik points out, the contemporary return of industrial policies reflects less a cyclical parenthesis than a lasting structural change in which states seek to regain control over technological dependencies, critical infrastructures and strategic value chains.^[64]

This intellectual shift is now manifesting itself both in the United States and within the European Union, even if institutional responses remain profoundly asymmetrical. American industrial policy is experiencing a spectacular revival through technology subsidies, export controls and the geopolitical reinterpretation of economic security. At the same time, the European Union is trying to adapt its competitive and industrial doctrines more slowly to an international environment that has become much more conflictual.

Western economic circles themselves have gradually changed their perception of the Chinese model. While the first years after China’s entry into the WTO were largely marked by optimism about the opening of the Chinese market, the reports published over the past fifteen years by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Chamber of Commerce in China and the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China reflect growing concern about the scale of Chinese government subsidies, competitive distortions, technology transfers, regulatory restrictions and the rise of an increasingly overt techno-nationalism. The latest reports are edifying on the effectiveness produced by the options chosen by the Chinese Government.^[65]

Even more profoundly, the contemporary period seems to mark the lasting return of power to the heart of the world economy. Industry, technology, data, competition, finance and national security now appear to be the different dimensions of the same systemic competition between major geopolitical entities. As already noted with Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, economic interdependencies themselves today tend to become potential instruments of coercion and strategic rivalry.^[66]

This fourth part will first analyze the progressive questioning of the liberal consensus inherited from the 1990s, marked by the return of the strategic state, the growing fragmentation of world trade and the emergence of the notions of economic security and technological sovereignty (A). It will then examine the way in which competition law now tends to be reinterpreted as an instrument of power in the major contemporary economies, revealing certain unexpected convergences between Chinese, American and, more recently, European approaches (B). Finally, it will study the specific difficulties encountered by the European Union in the face of the Chinese challenge: budgetary insufficiency, fragmentation of capital markets, relative weakness of European technological champions and persistent tensions between competitive orthodoxy and the imperatives of economic sovereignty (C).

A. The end of the liberal consensus of the 1990s?

Probably one of the most important transformations in the contemporary world economy is the gradual weakening of the liberal consensus that had largely dominated Western economic policies since the 1990s. During this period, trade openness, financial deregulation, international fragmentation of production chains and limited state intervention were generally perceived as the natural conditions for efficient and sustainable economic growth.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent generalization of market economies seemed to confirm the historic victory of the Western liberal model. China’s increasing integration into the world economy, culminating in its accession to the WTO in 2001, was widely interpreted as a further confirmation of this convergence dynamic.

As Thomas Friedman wrote at the time, globalization was supposed to gradually lead to a homogenization of economic behavior and a reduction in traditional geopolitical rivalries.^[67] Overall economic efficiency seemed to have to take precedence over considerations of power in the long term.

However, the evolution of Chinese capitalism has gradually called into question several of these fundamental postulates. Far from converging on a classical Western liberal model, China has developed an original form of managed capitalism combining international openness, centralized political control, massive public funding, strategic industrial support, and long-term technological planning.

This trajectory has deeply surprised a significant part of the Western economic elites. As Martin Wolf points out, many Western leaders had underestimated the ability of a politically authoritarian system to use the instruments of globalization to accelerate its own technological and industrial rise.^[68]

The global financial crisis of 2008 was the first major shock to the liberal consensus. While Western economies were deeply weakened by financial imbalances and deindustrialization, China appeared capable of quickly mobilizing its public levers in order to massively support investment and industrial activity. This divergence contributed to strengthening the relative attractiveness of the Chinese model in several regions of the world.

Sino-American trade tensions, the Covid-19 pandemic, global logistical disruptions and technological rivalries around semiconductors and batteries then accelerated this questioning. Global value chains gradually began to be re-evaluated not only in terms of economic efficiency but also in terms of strategic resilience.

The notion of « economic security » then became central to contemporary Western doctrines. It now refers to the ability of a state or a regional entity to preserve access to critical technologies, critical infrastructure, strategic data and vital supply chains in an international context perceived as more conflictual.

As Jake Sullivan points out, the United States now explicitly considers that certain technological or industrial dependencies can constitute major strategic vulnerabilities.^[69] This logic largely explains the return of American industrial policies, the restrictions on the export of sensitive technologies and the new industrial relocation strategies.

At the same time, technological sovereignty is becoming a central objective in the major advanced economies. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, cybersecurity, batteries and digital data are now perceived as sectors that directly condition the strategic autonomy and future power of states. This development is also reflected in a gradual fragmentation of world trade. Without witnessing a real deglobalization, the international economy tends to reorganize itself around technological blocks, privileged geopolitical partnerships and growing mechanisms for controlling investments, data or sensitive exports.

The major Western organizations representing the business communities present in China have themselves gradually integrated this new reality. Recent reports from the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China regularly highlight the effects of Chinese industrial subsidies, technology localization policies, and persistent regulatory asymmetries.^[70] For its part, the American Chamber of Commerce in China highlights the growing importance of geopolitical risks, technological restrictions and national security tensions in the contemporary Chinese economic environment.^[71]

As Graham Allison observes, the world economy is thus entering a phase of lasting systemic rivalry between major technological and industrial powers.^[72] This evolution does not necessarily mean the disappearance of global economic interdependence, but it implies its permanent reinterpretation through the prism of security, resilience and power.

The liberal consensus, in particular that of the « Washington Consensus » of the 1990s, therefore appeared to be profoundly shaken. The return of the strategic state, the rise of industrial policies, the politicization of value chains and the growing integration between the economy and national security probably reflect the emergence of a new geoeconomic paradigm whose contours are still largely in the making.

B. Competition as an Instrument of Power: Doctrinal Recomposition and Relative Convergence of Models

One of the most significant developments of the contemporary period lies in the gradual transformation of competition law, which tends to move away from the strictly economic and technical-legal framework in which it had historically developed to become, more explicitly, an instrument of articulation between market, technology and power. This evolution is not the result of a uniform shift, but rather of a partial and pragmatic convergence between the major economies, each adapting its competitive instruments to its own objectives of economic security and strategic competitiveness.

In the initially dominant model of the 1990s and 2000s, competition law was based on a relatively homogeneous logic: protection of consumer welfare, antitrust fighting, merger control and allocative efficiency of markets. This doctrinal architecture, strongly influenced by the so-called Chicago School in the United States and transposed to Europe in a version institutionalized by the European Commission, postulated that competition was above all an autonomous mechanism of economic efficiency, relatively disconnected from considerations of power or sovereignty.

However, this separation is now tending to fade. As A. Douglas Melamed points out, American antitrust itself is now crossed by tensions between an approach focused on economic efficiency and an approach that integrates more the issues of industrial structure, innovation and strategic resilience.^[73] This development directly reflects the broader transformations of the American political economy in the face of technological competition with China.

In the United States, competition policy has thus gradually integrated considerations that go beyond the sole framework of prices or consumer surplus. Under the influence of officials such as Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the U.S. Department of Justice, the analysis of the concentrations and behaviors of large digital platforms now more explicitly integrates the issues of structural market power, innovation, control of digital infrastructures and technological dependencies.

As Tim Wu observes, American competition law is thus partially returning to a more structural sensitivity, attentive to the risks of excessive concentration of economic power in essential sectors of the digital and industrial economy.^[74] This evolution does not constitute a total break with the American antitrust tradition, but rather an internal reconfiguration of its purposes.

At the same time, national security imperatives have gradually penetrated the competitive field. Restrictions on certain foreign acquisitions, tightened controls on investments and technological limitations on certain foreign players reflect a growing integration between competition law and economic security. The activity of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is a particular illustration of this hybridization between competitive logic and national security logic.

On the Chinese side, the evolution is even more explicit. In China, competition law, long seen as an instrument of progressive market organization, is now fully integrated into a broader architecture of industrial policy and strategic economic governance. The interventions targeting platforms such as Alibaba Group, Tencent or Meituan cannot be understood only through the classic categories of competition, but are part of a logic combining the regulation of private monopolies, data control, financial stabilization and the political framework of large technology groups.

As Angela Huyue Zhang points out, China’s regulation of digital platforms illustrates the gradual fusion of competition law, cybersecurity law and political governance of the digital economy.^[75] Competition is not conceived as an end in itself, but as a tool in the service of multiple objectives of technological sovereignty and systemic stability.

The European Union has a more ambivalent trajectory. Historically based on a logic of competitive neutrality, European law has long been conceived as a mechanism for preserving the internal market rather than as an instrument of external power. However, under the combined effect of geoeconomic tensions and growing technological dependencies, a gradual inflection is observable. As Mario Draghi points out, European competitiveness now depends on the ability to articulate competition policy, industrial policy and technological sovereignty in a coherent whole.^[76] This evolution implies a partial rereading of the traditional objectives of competition, particularly in strategic sectors. The European debate on « industrial champions » is a perfect illustration of this tension. The Siemens/Alstom  affair has crystallised the divergences between a strictly competitive approach, defended by the European Commission, and a more geo-economic approach defended by several Member States, notably France and Germany. In this context, some authors point out that competition law is now tending to become a « common language » of economic power, used differently depending on the system but mobilized for converging purposes of strategic security. As Anu Bradford explains, the great powers are now using their economic legal frameworks — antitrust, digital regulation, investment controls — as instruments of influence in global competition.^[77]

This relative convergence does not mean uniformity. The United States retains a legally sophisticated antitrust tradition but is now more open to industrial considerations; China explicitly assumes the integration of competition law into a global power strategy; and the European Union is trying to preserve its legal model while gradually adapting it to the imperatives of economic sovereignty. Thus, competition no longer appears to be an autonomous and neutral area of international economic law. It becomes a space for mediation between potentially contradictory objectives: economic efficiency, innovation, national security, technological sovereignty and industrial competitiveness. This transformation marks an important step in the recomposition of the very foundations of contemporary economic law.

C. The European Union and the Chinese challenge: structural constraints, economic sovereignty and tensions in the competitive model

The European Union occupies a unique position in the current recomposition of the world economy. Unlike  the United States and China, it does not have a fully integrated federal state in terms of budget, industry and technology. This institutional characteristic, long perceived as a normative asset based on regulation and law, now appears to be a constraint in an international environment dominated by massive industrial policies and assumed power strategies.

The rise of China has acted as a revelation of the structural limits of the European model. This is based on a complex relationship between the internal market, competitive discipline, strict State aid frameworks and the persistent fragmentation of industrial policies between Member States. As Jean Pisani-Ferry points out, Europe is faced with a fundamental dilemma: preserving the coherence of its competitive order while rebuilding investment and innovation capacities that are equal to global technological rivalries.^[78]

One of the major handicaps of the Union lies in the lack of centralised budgetary capacities that could make it possible to take advantage of a consolidation of Europe’s fragmented financial power. Unlike the United States, which is able to mobilise massive federal instruments such as the CHIPS and Science Act or the Inflation Reduction Act, Europe remains constrained by a limited Community budget and a strong dependence on national budgets, some of which, unfortunately, are also in large deficit. Schemes such as the IPCEI or the European Chips Act bear witness to a real effort to structure the industry, but it is still fragmented and very insufficient in terms of comparative effectiveness.^[79]

This fragmentation is coupled with an incomplete integration of European capital markets, which limits the ability of companies to finance their growth on a large scale. Many European technology companies are thus forced to finance themselves or to go public outside the Union, mainly in the United States, which accentuates a phenomenon of structural dependence.As ^[80]Mario Draghi  points out in his 2024 report, this financial fragmentation is a major obstacle to European technological sovereignty and the continent’s industrial ramp-up.^[81]

In addition to these constraints, there is the relative slowness of European decision-making processes, linked to the Union’s multi-level governance. This institutional temporality contrasts sharply with the strategic responsiveness observed in China and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, particularly in critical technology areas. Europe also suffers from a relative weakness in the emergence of global industrial champions in strategic sectors. In digital technologies, advanced semiconductors, the cloud or digital platforms, the Union remains largely dependent on American or Asian players.

European business circles present in China, in particular the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, regularly highlight the distortions of competition linked to Chinese industrial subsidies, market access barriers and structural asymmetries of competition. These analyses converge with those of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the rise of industrial capitalism strongly supported by the Chinese state.^[82] These observations feed into an increasingly structuring doctrinal debate on the evolution of European competition law. Historically focused on the protection of the internal market and the prevention of national distortions, it is now being questioned in the light of broader objectives: industrial resilience, technological sovereignty and economic security.^[83] However, this development is coming up against significant internal tensions. Some Member States defend a strict conception of competition, guaranteeing efficiency and integration of the internal market, while others advocate a more flexible approach allowing the creation of European industrial groups capable of competing with the major world economic powers.As ^[84]Margrethe Vestager pointed out, European competition policy must now reconcile market opening, innovation and the imperatives of economic sovereignty.^[85]

Thus, the European Union appears to be both a major normative power and an incomplete industrial power. Its ability to adapt will depend on its ability to articulate competition policy and industrial policy more closely in an international environment marked by the rise of strategic capitalism.

Conclusion

Twenty-five years after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, the historical record appears to be singularly far from the expectations formulated in the early 2000s by a large part of the Western economic elite. Global trade integration has not led to institutional convergence towards the Western liberal model; On the contrary, it accompanied the gradual emergence of an original form of administered capitalism combining market, strategic planning, industrial policy, technological control and state power.

The Chinese experience thus reveals a profound transformation in the relationship between competition and power. In the contemporary Chinese model, competition is neither rejected nor conceived as an autonomous end. It remains subordinate to the higher objectives of technological sovereignty, economic security, political stability and industrial upgrading. Instruments that have traditionally been analysed separately – competition law, public subsidies, technical standardisation, data monitoring, public funding, state-owned enterprises, trade policy or national security policy – are now part of an integrated strategic architecture, characterised by its continuity, speed of execution and remarkable capacity for coordination.

As Barry Naughton observes, China has gradually developed  » an extraordinarily adaptive industrial system, capable of combining decentralized experimentation and centralized strategic management . »^[86] This ability to articulate economic flexibility and political leadership is undoubtedly one of the major structural differences with contemporary European economies, whose decision-making mechanisms remain more fragmented, slower and often constrained by complex institutional balances.

Similarly, Scott Kennedy stresses that China’s industrial policy cannot be reduced to a simple set of public subsidies: it constitutes « a complete ecosystem of coordinated support for national competitiveness « ,^[87] combining public finance, technological policies, administrative regulation, supply chain control and normative influence strategies. It is precisely this systemic coherence that partly explains the difficulties encountered by Western economies in responding effectively to the rise of China.

Even more profoundly, several great contemporary Chinese intellectuals themselves insist on the structural and lasting nature of this transformation. Justin Yifu Lin, former chief economist of the World Bank, said China’s development was based less on an opposition between the market and the state than on their dynamic articulation in a continuous process of structural transformation.^[88] According to this approach, economies that are able to organise long-term coordination between innovation, financing, industrial policy and technological upgrading have a decisive advantage in phases of global industrial transition. This idea of strategic continuity also appears at the heart of the analyses of Zheng Yongnian and Sarah Tang. For them, China’s contemporary comparative advantage no longer lies solely in its market size, industrial capacity or production costs, but in its ability to maintain a coherent strategic vision over several decades, whereas Western democracies are often constrained by shorter political timeframes and increasing decision-making fragmentation.^[89] From this angle, the Chinese question does not only refer to a differential in economic competitiveness; it more fundamentally questions the ability of contemporary great powers to articulate sovereignty, technology, financing, industry and political stability in an international environment that has become durably conflictual.

The contrast with the European Union appears particularly striking today. Despite a now real awareness of the challenges of industrial and technological sovereignty, European responses are still largely incomplete. The Draghi report has highlighted with rare clarity the risk of progressive marginalisation of the European economy in critical technologies, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, energy, digital infrastructure and defence industries.^[90] Yet, European instruments often remain dispersed between national levels and European institutions, while fiscal rules, fragmented capital markets and historical constraints on state aid law continue to limit the speed of collective action.

From this perspective, the risk for Europeans is not only economic. It is also technological, normative and geopolitical. Industrial disengagement could gradually lead to increased dependence in strategic sectors, ultimately reducing Europe’s ability to preserve its decision-making autonomy, digital sovereignty and international influence. As Mark Wu points out, the major contemporary rivalries are now less about trade than about  » the ability of states to organize and secure the technological ecosystems of the future . »^[91]

Behind the transformations of Chinese industrial policy, as Wang Hui has suggested, the gradual emergence of a non-Western form of economic modernity is thus perhaps taking shape more broadly, in which the classic categories separating state, market and power gradually lose their traditional analytical scope.^[92] China’s evolution is therefore no longer just a commercial or competitive challenge for developed economies; it is part of a deeper recomposition of the world economic order and the very foundations of contemporary capitalism.

The challenge for Europe therefore no longer lies solely in the marginal adaptation of its competitive or industrial instruments. More fundamentally, it consists in determining whether it remains capable of rebuilding, in a profoundly transformed international environment, a truly collective strategic capacity that is equal to the power dynamics now at work in global economic relations.

*  *

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Appendix 1

Key indicators of China’s industrial and technological rise 

after WTO accession (2001-2013)

 

Indicator	2001	2013	Evolution / observations
China’s nominal GDP	approx. USD 1,340 billion	approx. USD 9,600 billion	Multiplication by more than 7; Transition to the rank of second largest economy in the world
China’s share of global GDP	approx. 4 %	approx. 12 %	Tripling of the global economic weight
Exports of goods	approx. USD 266 billion	approx. USD 2,210 billion	Multiplication by more than 8; World’s leading exporter from 2009
Share in world manufacturing exports	approx. 6 %	approx. 17-18 %	Progressive dominance of global industrial value chains
Trade surplus	approx. USD 22 billion	approx. USD 259 billion	Massive accumulation of reserves and investment capacity
Foreign exchange reserves	approx. USD 212 billion	approx. USD 3,880 billion	World’s largest foreign exchange reserves
Annual FDI inflows	approx. USD 47 billion	approx. USD 123 billion	Deep integration into productive globalization
Urban population	approx. 37 %	approx. 53 %	Accelerated urbanization supporting industrialization and consumption
National R&D expenditure	approx. 0.95% of GDP	approx. 2.01% of GDP	Strong technological move upmarket
Chinese R&D expenditure (absolute)	approx. USD 33 billion	approx. USD 191 billion	The world’s second largest investor in R&D
Annual Number of STEM Graduates	approx. 1.5 million	more than 4 million	Building a vast technological human capital
Steel production	approx. 150 Mt	approx. 779 Mt	World’s leading producer with massive capacities
Automotive production	approx. 2.3 million	approx. 22 million	World’s largest automotive market
Share of state-owned enterprises in strategic sectors	Majority	Majority	Maintaining public control despite the opening
China’s share of global cement consumption	approx. 40 %	more than 55%	Exceptional intensity of infrastructure investment
Length of the high-speed rail network	almost non-existent	more than 11,000 km	Accelerated industrial and technological deployment
Internet users	approx. 22 million	more than 600 million	China Digital Economy Foundation
Global Ranking of Chinese Ports (Top 10 Global)	3 ports	7 ports	Increasing control of global logistics infrastructure
China’s contribution to global growth	approx. 7 %	more than 30%	Increasing centrality in the global economy

Sources: data compiled from statistics from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the National Bureau of Statistics of China and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China; v. equal. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Adaptation and Growth, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2018; Nicholas R. Lardy, Integrating China into the Global Economy, Washington D.C., Brookings Institution, 2002; Justin Yifu Lin, Demystifying the Chinese Economy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012; Scott Kennedy, The State and the Market in Contemporary China, Washington D.C., Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2016. The data are rounded and presented primarily for illustrative purposes in order to show the major structural trends of China’s industrial and technological acceleration after WTO accession.

Appendix 2

Comparative indicators of global geoeconomic reconfiguration: China – United States – European Union (2001-2025)

Strategic indicators	China	United States	European Union
Share of world manufacturing (2001)	approx. 8 %	approx. 25 %	approx. 22 %
Share of global manufacturing industry (2024-2025)	approx. 31-32%	approx. 15-16 %	approx. 14-15 %
R&D expenditure (% gdp, 2001)	approx. 0.9%	approx. 2.7%	approx. 1.8%
R&D expenditure (% GDP, 2024)	approx. 2.6-2.7%	approx. 3.4-3.5%	approx. 2.2-2.3%
Total Annual R&D Expenditure (2024, Current USD)	approx. $720-750 billion	approx. $880-950 billion	approx. $430-470 billion
Global production of lithium-ion batteries (2024)	approx. 75-80 %	approx. 6-7 %	approx. 7-8 %
Global share of rare earth refining capacity (2024)	approx. 85-90 %	< 5%	marginal
Global share of solar panel installations (2024)	> 80%	approx. 3-4 %	approx. 2-3 %
Global share of electric vehicles produced (2024)	approx. 58-60 %	approx. 10-12 %	approx. 15-17 %
Direct public spending announced on semiconductors (2020-2025)	> estimated cumulative $150 billion	approx. $52 billion (CHIPS Act federal excluding local aid)	approx. €43 billion (European Chips Act + estimated national aid)
Number of the world’s top 10 digital companies (capitalization, 2025)	2-3	6-7	0
Global share of patent filings (WIPO, 2024)	approx. 45-46%	approx. 18-19 %	approx. 17-18 %
Share of global high-tech exports (2024)	approx. 26-28 %	approx. 14-15 %	approx. 15-16 %
Share of global advanced semiconductor production capacity (<10 nm)	still limited (<10%) but strong growth	Leadership Design + Critical Equipment	High external dependence
Centralized public financing capacity for industrial policies	Very strong centralization of the State/public banks/provinces	Recent sharp rise via federal plans	Fragmented between Member States and the Commission
Dominant competition doctrine (2000-2015)	Competition subordinated to industrial strategy	Primacy of consumer welfare	Primacy of the internal market and competitive neutrality
Dominant competition doctrine (2020-2025)	Competition as an integrated policy instrument	Antitrust + Economic Security + Technological Sovereignty	Gradual rebalancing between competition and sovereignty

Sources: Data compiled from statistics from the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Intellectual Property Organization, theInternational Energy Agency, the Semiconductor Industry Association, the International Energy Agency, the Draghi Reporton European competitiveness (2024), the work of Barry Naughton, Chris Miller, Scott Kennedy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China as well as the main Chinese and American industrial statistics published between 2023 and 2025. The figures mentioned constitute consolidated orders of magnitude intended to illustrate the structural trends of contemporary industrial and technological competition.

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^[1] Lester C. Thurow, Head to Head. The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe and America, New York, William Morrow and Company, 1992, XIII-321 p.; by the same author, The Future of Capitalism. How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World, New York, William Morrow and Company, 1996, X-385 p.; Robert B. REICH, The Work of Nations. Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, XVI-331 p.; Laura by Andrea TYSON, Who’s Bashing Whom? Trade Conflict in High-Technology Industries, Washington D.C., Institute for International Economics, 1992, XII-311 p.; for a contemporary reformulation of this logic in the normative and regulatory field, see also Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect. How the European Union Rules the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, XX-424 p.

^[2] François Souty, « Chinese competition law since 2007: between economic modernization, platform control and power strategy », Le Diplomate Média, May 2026, online. It already underlines the specificity of a competition law integrated into a broader architecture of economic sovereignty, industrial policy and national security, which is significantly different from Western competition traditions.

^[3] Mario Draghi,The Future of European Competitiveness, report submitted to the European Commission, Brussels, European Commission, Sept. 2024, 393 p., spec. pp. 1-23, 67-89 and 271-299; v. equal. European Commission,The future of European competitiveness – In-depth analysis and recommendations, Brussels, 2024. European Commission – Draghi Report.

^[4] François Souty, « The Draghi Report and the Future of European Competition Policy: Between Industrial Awakening, Economic Sovereignty and Geopolitical Fragmentation », Diplomate Média, Dec. 2025, online, spec. on the tensions between European competitiveness, state aid, industrial policy and Sino-American rivalry.

^[5] Nicholas R. Lardy, Integrating China into the Global Economy, Washington D.C., Brookings Institution, 2002, esp. pp. 3-18.

^[6] Barry Naughton, The Rise of China’s Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020, Mexico City, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021, esp. pp. 9-16; see also. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Adaptation and Growth, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 2018, esp. pp. 395-451.

^[7] Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), especially pp. 17-31.

^[8] Harry First, « China and Global Antitrust, » World Competition, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2009, pp. 7-26, esp. pp. 9-13; see also. Harry First and Spencer Weber Waller, Advanced Introduction to Competition Law and Economics, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013.

^[9] Mark Wu, « The « China, Inc. » Challenge to Global Trade Governance », Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 57, No. 2, 2016, pp. 261-324, esp. pp. 270-289

^[10] Justin Yifu Lin, Demystifying the Chinese Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 1-24; see equal. Justin Yifu Lin, « New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development, » The World Bank Research Observer, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2011, pp. 193-221

^[11] Zheng Yongnian, China’s Great Transformation (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2008), esp. pp. 45-67; see equal. Zheng Yongnian and Sarah Y. Tong (eds.), China’s Evolving Industrial Policies and Economic Restructuring, London/New York, Routledge, 2015

^[12] Scott Kennedy, The State and the Market in Contemporary China: Toward the 13th Five-Year Plan, Washington D.C., Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2016, esp. p. 3-11.

^[13] Barry Naughton, The Rise of China’s Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020, Mexico City, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021, esp. pp. 7-24; see also. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Adaptation and Growth, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 2018, esp. pp. 395-451.

^[14] Sebastian Heilmann, Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy-Making Facilitated China’s Rise (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2018), esp. pp. 31-58; see equal. Sebastian Heilmann, « Policy Experimentation in China’s Economic Rise », Studies in Comparative International Development, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2008, pp. 1-26.

^[15] Nicholas R. Lardy, Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China, Washington D.C., Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2014, p. 89-127

^[16] Scott Kennedy, The Fat Tech Dragon: Benchmarking China’s Innovation Drive (Washington, D.C., Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2024), esp. pp. 4-24; see equal. Scott Kennedy, « The Myth of China’s State Capitalism, » Foreign Affairs, Vol. 104, No. 1, 2025, pp. 54-68

^[17] Zheng Yongnian, China’s Great Transformation (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2008), esp. pp. 112-139; see equal. Zheng Yongnian and Lance L.P. Gore (eds.), China Enters the Xi Jinping Era, London/New York, Routledge, 2015.

^[18] Mario Draghi, The Future of European Competitiveness, report submitted to the European Commission, Brussels, European Commission, Sept. 2024, esp. pp. 67-89 and 271-299. See notes 3 and 4.

^[19] François Souty, « Chinese Competition Law: Between Economic Openness, State Control and Industrial Strategy », Concurrences, No. 4-2010, Art. No. 35678, esp. pp. 12-27; see equal. François Souty, « Chinese competition law since 2007: between economic modernization, platform control and power strategy », Le Diplomate Média, May 2026, online.

^[20] Anti-Monopoly Law of the People’s Republic of China (adopted on 30 August 2007 by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, entered into force on 1 August 2008, revised in 2022), art. 1:  » This Law is enacted for the purpose of preventing and restraining monopolistic conduct, protecting fair market competition, enhancing economic efficiency, safeguarding the interests of consumers and the public interest,  and promoting the healthy development of the socialist market economy « . See note 22 infra: Angela Huyue Zhang, Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How the Rise of China Challenges.

^[21] Harry First, « China and Global Antitrust, » World Competition, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2009, pp. 7-26, esp. pp. 8-15; see equal. Harry First and Spencer Weber Waller, Advanced Introduction to Competition Law and Economics, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013.

^[22] Angela Huyue Zhang, Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How the Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), esp. pp. 1-34; see also Angela Huyue Zhang, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024.

^[23] Mark Wu, « The « China, Inc. » Challenge to Global Trade Governance », Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 57, No. 2, 2016, pp. 261-324, esp. pp. 270-302.

^[24] Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Adaptation and Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018), esp. pp. 395-451; see also. Barry Naughton, The Rise of China’s Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020, Mexico City, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021.

^[25] See not. « Xi stresses anti-monopoly regulation, anti-pollution fight, better reserve system, » People’s Daily Online (Xinhua), August 31, 2021; « Xi: Accelerate upgrading of industries, » People’s Daily Online, May 6, 2023; Angela Huyue Zhang, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), esp. pp. 56-103; see equal. Angela Huyue Zhang, « Chinese Tech Regulation and Geopolitical Competition, » Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2023, pp. 245–276; Mark Wu, « The « China, Inc. » Challenge to Global Trade Governance », Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 57, no. 2, 2016, pp. 261-324, esp. pp. 294-302.

^[26] Angela Huyue Zhang, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), esp. pp. 56-103; see equal. Angela Huyue Zhang, « Chinese Tech Regulation and Geopolitical Competition, » Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2023, pp. 245-276.

^[27] Op. cit. cit.

^[28] Sebastian Heilmann, op.cit., spec. pp. 173-214.

^[29] Rush Doshi, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, esp. pp. 95-162.

^[30] Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015), esp. pp. 87-146.

^[31] « Xi: Accelerate upgrading of industries, » People’s Daily Online, May 6, 2023; see equal. « Xi stresses self-reliance in science and technology, » People’s Daily Online, May 29, 2021.

^[32] Angela Huyue Zhang, op.cit., spec. pp. 56-103 ; v. equal. Angela Huyue Zhang, « Chinese Tech Regulation and Geopolitical Competition, » Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2023, pp. 245-276.

^[33] Scott Kennedy,Made in China 2025, Washington D.C.,Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2015, spec. pp. 1-38; v. equal. Scott Kennedy, « The Fat Tech Dragon »,Foreign Affairs, vol. 104, no. 1, 2025, pp. 54-68. See not.U.S. Chamber of Commerce – Made in China 2025: Global Ambitions Built on Local Protections, Washington D.C., U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2017, spec. pp. 1-34;U.S. Chamber of Commerce – Was Made in China 2025 Successful?, report prepared by Rhodium Group for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Washington D.C., May 5, 2025, spec. pp. 3-42;China’s Next-Generation Industrial Policy, Rhodium Group/U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Washington D.C., May 2026, spec. Executive Summary and pp. 1-18. V. equal.Made in China 2025: Evaluating China’s Performance, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Washington D.C., Nov. 2025, spec. pp. 3-27; « As Beijing’s ‘Made in China 2025’ Plan Nears Finish Line, How Well Has It Done? »,South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 2024, cited and analyzed in the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report above, Appendix I. The European Chamber of Commerce in China has participated in a more modest but interesting insight: European Union Chamber of Commerce in China,Made in China 2025: The Cost of Technological Leadership, Beijing, EUCCC, 2025, spec. p. 5-39.

These different studies largely converge to point out that, despite some persistent delays in advanced semiconductors, aeronautics or some high-precision equipment, China has met or exceeded several major objectives of the program in electric vehicles, batteries, electrical equipment, railway infrastructure, maritime equipment or certain digital technologies, thanks in particular to a combination of coherent public subsidies, regulatory barriers, directed financing, support for public enterprises and strategic control of the internal market.

^[34] Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022), spec. pp. 187-289.

^[35] Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (New York: Viking, 2021), esp. pp. 245-286; see equal. Adam Tooze, « Industrial Policy Is Back, » Foreign Policy, Dec. 14, 2021.

^[36] Rush Doshi, op.cit., Spec. pp. 95-162. See note 29.

^[37] Barry Naughton, op.cit., esp. pp. 24-41; see equal. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Adaptation and Growth, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 2018, esp. pp. 395-451.

^[38] Angela Huyue Zhang, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, esp. pp. 34-89.

^[39] Barry Naughton, The Rise of China’s Industrial Policy, 1978 to 2020, op.cit.  spec. pp. 24-41; v. equal. Barry Naughton, « The State Strike Back: The End of Economic Reform in China? », op.cit., pp. 48-57.

^[40] Nicholas R. Lardy, Markets over Mao. op.cit.  See spec. pp. 89-127.

^[41] Sebastian Heilmann, Red Swan, op.cit., see spec. pp. 31-58 and 173-214.

^[42] Scott Kennedy, op.cit., esp. pp. 4-24.

^[43] Samm Sacks, « New China Data Privacy Standard Looks More Like GDPR Than Expected, » Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington D.C., May 7, 2021; v. alike. Samm Sacks, « Beijing Wants to Rewrite the Rules of the Digital Economy, » Foreign Affairs, March 18, 2021.

^[44] Angela Huyue Zhang, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), esp. pp. 56-103; see equal. Angela Huyue Zhang, « Chinese Tech Regulation and Geopolitical Competition, » Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2023, pp. 245–276

^[45]Ant Group‘s aborted IPO in 2020  is emblematic. Initially set to become the largest IPO in global financial history, for more than $300 billion, the deal was abruptly suspended days before its launch after Jack Ma  publicly criticized China’s financial regulators. This episode spectacularly illustrated the persistent primacy of the imperatives of political stability, financial security and strategic control over purely market or shareholder logics in contemporary Chinese capitalism. « Listing interrupted: China suspends Ant Group’s $37bn IPO », Reuters/Al Jazeera, Nov. 3, 2020; « China slams the brakes on Ant Group’s $37 billion listing, » Reuters, Nov. 3, 2020; Lulu Yilun Chen, Enda Curran and Sofia Horta e Costa, « Derailing of Jack Ma’s Ant IPO shows Xi Jinping is in charge », Bloomberg / The Japan Times, 5 Nov. 2020; Angela Huyue Zhang, High Wire. Op.cit. v. spec. pp. 87-112; v. equal. « Chinese President Xi Jinping decided to halt Ant’s IPO, » Reuters citing information from the Wall Street Journal, Nov. 13, 2020.

^[46] Dani Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), esp. pp. 197-248; see equal. Dani Rodrik, « Industrial Policy for the Twenty-First Century, » Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper, 2004.

^[47] Jake Sullivan,  » Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership , » speech at the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., 27 Apr. 2023; v. equal. Jake Sullivan, « The Sources of American Power, » Foreign Affairs, Vol. 102, No. 6, 2023, pp. 8-21.

^[48] Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi, « Underestimating China, » Foreign Affairs, Vol. 100, No. 5, 2021, pp. 18-24.

^[49] Jennifer M. Harris, « The New Economics of Power, » Foreign Affairs, Vol. 103, No. 2, 2024, pp. 10-27; see also. Jennifer Harris and Jake Sullivan, « America Needs a New Economic Philosophy, » The Atlantic, Oct. 2023

^[50] Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, New York, Scribner, 2022, spec. pp. 187-289

^[51] Robert D. Atkinson, « Competition Policy and National Competitiveness » (Washington, D.C.: Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 2020). Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind, Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018.

^[52] Mario Monti,  » Competition Policy in a Globalized Economy , » lecture at the Fordham Competition Law Institute, New York, 31 Oct. 2001; Mario Monti,  » The Future for Competition Policy in the European Union « , speech, Merchant Taylor’s Hall, London, 9 July 2019. 2001.

^[53] Jean Pisani-Ferry, The Awakening of the Demons: The Euro Crisis and How to Get Out of It, Paris, Fayard, 2011; see equal. Jean Pisani-Ferry and George Papaconstantinou, Europe’s Ground Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024, esp. p. 201-248

^[54] Isabelle de Silva, « Politique de concurrence et souverainité économique », in Concurrence et souveraineté, Paris, Concurrences, coll. « Concurrences », 2022, p. 15-27.

^[55] Mario Draghi, The Future of European Competitiveness, report submitted to the European Commission, Brussels, European Commission, Sept. 2024, esp. pp. 1-24, 67-89 and 271-299.

^[56] Anu Bradford, Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), esp. pp. 287-352; see equal. Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020.

^[57] Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2023), esp. pp. 1-37 and 189-267; see also Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, « Weaponized Interdependence, » International Security, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2019, pp. 42-79.

^[58] Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, New York, Viking, 2021, spec. pp. 245-286.

^[59] Janet L. Yellen,  » Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen on Way Forward for the Global Economy , » Atlantic Council, Washington D.C., 13 Apr. 2022; see also « Friend-shoring Global Supply Chains », official speech of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

^[60] Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022), spec. pp. 187-352

^[61] Mark Wu, « The « China, Inc. » Challenge to Global Trade Governance », Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 57, No. 2, 2016, pp. 261-324, esp. pp. 294-317

^[62] Margrethe Vestager,  » Europe’s Place in the New Industrial Revolution « , speech at the European Policy Centre, Brussels, 2022; see also. Margrethe Vestager,  » Competition Policy in Support of Europe’s Green Ambition « , speech, 2021. Online.

^[63] Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016; Richard Baldwin, « The Globotics Upheaval », Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019, spec. p. 301-336.

^[64] Dani Rodrik, Straight Talk on Trade: op.cit., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017, esp. pp. 197-248; see equal. Dani Rodrik, « Industrial Policy for the Twenty-First Century », op.cit., 2004.

^[65] U.S Chamber of Commerce, Made in China 2025, op. cit. cit., American Chamber of Commerce in China, China Business Climate Survey Report 2025, op.cit., link: American Chamber of Commerce in China – China Business Climate Survey Report 2025; European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, European Business in China Position Paper 2024/2025, Beijing, 20205. Link:European Union Chamber of Commerce in China – European Business in China Position Paper 2024/2025.

^[66] Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2023), esp. pp. 1-37 and 189-267; see also Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, « Weaponized Interdependence, » International Security, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2019, pp. 42-79.

^[67] Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), esp. pp. 7-29.

^[68] Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2023, spec. pp. 187-244.

^[69] Jake Sullivan, « Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Renewing American Economic Leadership, » speech at the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., Apr. 27, 2023.

^[70] European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, European Business in China Position Paper 2024/2025, Beijing, EUCCC, 2024, esp. pp. 23-67 and 143-201.

^[71] American Chamber of Commerce in China, China Business Climate Survey Report 2025, Beijing, AmCham China, 2025, esp. p. 11-39.

^[72] Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, Boston/New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, esp. p. 29-58.

^[73] A. Douglas Melamed, « Antitrust Law and Its Critics, » University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 85, no. 3, 2018, pp. 251-276; see also A. Douglas Melamed and Nicolas Petit, « The Misguided Assault on the Consumer Welfare Standard, » George Mason Law Review, vol. 53, 2016, pp. 39-65.

^[74] Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness, op.cit., spec. pp. 12-48.

^[75] Angela Huyue Zhang, High Wire, op.cit, esp. pp. 56-103 and 211-240.

^[76] Mario Draghi, op. cit., spec. pp. 67-120 and 271-299.

^[77] Anu Bradford, op. cit., spec. pp. 287-352.

^[78] Jean Pisani-Ferry, The Awakening of the Demons: The Euro Crisis and How to Get Out of It, Paris, Fayard, 2011; see equal. Jean Pisani-Ferry and George Papaconstantinou, Europe’s Ground Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024, esp. p. 201-248

^[79] François Souty, « Digital Markets Act, European, American and Chinese regulation: digital sovereignty and reconfiguration of competition law », Le Diplomate Média, 4 February 2026.

^[80] François Souty, « America First Antitrust: The Conservative Revival of American Antitrust under the Trump II Administration », Le Diplomate Média, 13 January 2026.

^[81] Mario Draghi, op.citt, 2024, esp. pp. 1-24, 67-120 and 271-299.

^[82] European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, op.cit., 2024/2025, Beijing, EUCCC, 2024, esp. pp. 23-67 and 143-201. U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Made in China 2025: Global Ambitions Built on Local Protections, Washington D.C., 2017, https://www.uschamber.com/report/made-china-2025-global-ambitions-built-local-protections-0.

^[83] François Souty, « Competition policy and competition law in the European Union: contemporary recompositions and issues of economic sovereignty », Le Diplomate Média, 5 January 2026.

^[84] François Souty, « Competition and Antitrust Policy in Europe and the United States: Transatlantic Perspectives and Geopolitical Issues », Le Diplomate Média, 30 December 2025.

^[85] Margrethe Vestager, « Competition Policy in Support of Europe’s Green and Digital Transitions », European Commission, speech, 2021; v. equal. Margrethe Vestager, « Europe’s Place in the New Industrial Revolution », European Policy Centre, Brussels, 2022.

^[86] Barry Naughton, op.cit., 2021, 76 p., spec. pp. 12-24; v. equal. Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: op.cit.  2018, esp. p. 395-451.

^[87] Scott Kennedy, The Fat Tech Dragon: Benchmarking China’s Innovation Drive (Washington, D.C., Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2024), esp. pp. 4-17; see equal. Scott Kennedy, « The Myth of China’s State Capitalism, » Foreign Affairs, Vol. 104, No. 1, 2025, pp. 54-68.

^[88] Justin Yifu Lin, « Industrial Policy Revisited: A New Structural Economics Perspective, » China Economic Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2014, pp. 382-396; see also. Justin Yifu Lin and Jianjun Zhou, « China’s Industrial Development Strategies and Policies, » in Xiaolan Fu et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of China Innovation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, pp. 56-72.

^[89] Zheng Yongnian and Sarah Y. Tong (eds.), China’s Evolving Industrial Policies and Economic Restructuring, London/New York, Routledge, 2015, spec. Introduction and pp. 1-18; v. equal. Zheng Yongnian, Technology and Industrial Transformation of China, London, Routledge, 2024.

^[90] Mario Draghi, op.cit., spec. pp. 1-23, 67-89 and 271-299.

^[91] Mark Wu, « The « China, Inc. » Challenge to Global Trade Governance, » Harvard International Law Journal, vol. 57, no. 2, 2016, pp. 261-324, esp. pp. 302-318; see also. Mark Wu, « Weaponized Interdependence and Technological Sovereignty, » Harvard Law School Working Paper, 2023.

^[92] Wang Hui, The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2020 (reed.), spec. vol. IV; v. equal. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century, London/New York, Verso, 2016.

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