The preceding chapter examined how the Chinese Communist Party manages the internal machinery of power and prosperity: the governance-development nexus through which household registration, information control, credit systems, and demographic policy are wielded to sustain a performance-based claim to legitimacy. This chapter turns outward to the domain in which that same claim is tested most visibly on the international stage. Since close to 2015, technology has displaced trade and even military posture as the terrain on which Washington and Beijing measure one another most anxiously. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence models, telecommunications equipment, electric vehicles, and the applications that sit on top of them are no longer treated as commercial products alone; they are treated as instruments of state power, and access to them is rationed, denied, and fought over accordingly.
