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Posted on 11/27/2025 4:05:18 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Those who worry about how to cope with China’s leadership in technology—and there are plenty of them—think hard about electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels and open-source artificial intelligence. For such people, we have some bad news. This week we report how China is rapidly pressing ahead in two other frontier technologies, autonomous vehicles and new drugs. As these industries spread around the world, they will exemplify the power of Chinese innovation.
China’s progress in each of these important areas has been staggering. A robotaxi revolution is gathering pace, which could reshape transport, logistics and everyday urban life. The country’s autonomous taxis, constructed for a third of the cost of Waymo’s in America, are racking up millions of kilometres of driving and are forging partnerships in Europe and the Middle East. In medicine, meanwhile, China has turned itself from a copycat maker of generics into the world’s second-largest developer of new drugs, including those tackling cancer. Western rivals are licensing its firms’ wares. The day when a pharma giant emerges from China no longer seems so remote.
The rise of both industries says much about how Chinese innovation works. A deep pool of talent, a broad manufacturing base and huge scale combine to propel it rapidly up the value chain. The production of robotaxis has piggybacked on mass ev manufacturing and a dominance in the supply of lidars and the other sensors needed for self-driving; scale has also helped bring down costs. Armies of patients enlisted in clinical trials and profits from generic drugmaking have speeded up pharma innovation.
A more surprising ingredient of China’s success is its nimble and permissive regulators. As in other industries, local governments have offered firms cheap credit and other help. But it is agile rulemaking that has really turbo-charged progress. Soon after political leaders set out their ambition for China to become a “biotechnology superpower” in 2016, the country implemented a number of reforms. The drug regulator’s workforce quadrupled between 2015 and 2018, and a backlog of 20,000 new drug applications was cleared in just two years. The time taken to secure approval for human trials shrank from 501 days to 87. Last year firms in the country ran a third of the world’s clinical trials.
Likewise, China was early to experiment with robotaxis. Local officials, keen to attract talent and investment, approved pilots at a rapid clip and installed sensors and other digital infrastructure to help guide self-driving vehicles; trials have run in over 50 cities.
Many have experimented, too, with laws on liabilities and guidelines for testing. Though accidents have sometimes caused a hiatus, pilot schemes have helped engineers and policymakers understand the new technology.
Cut-throat competition at home imposes harsh conditions on individual companies, but the survivors are conditioned into becoming hypercompetitive export champions. China’s robotaxi operators compete with each other and with cheap human-driven taxis in an economy gripped by deflation. New technologies receive subsidies that ultimately come out of the pockets of its underpaid people. Many lossmaking enterprises will not survive the resulting price wars. But those that do will look overseas to make money.
A new wave of Chinese low-cost innovation will therefore wash around the world. It will do so in different ways. China’s cheap medicines could bring benefits, and particularly to the developing world. But for its companies America’s lucrative market, which is the source of 70% of global pharma profits, is the juiciest prize. And China’s importance for the pipelines of Western drugmakers means that the relationship could even be symbiotic. Robotaxis, by contrast, are likely to follow the more usual path for China’s tech exports. They are blocked by America, which has its own industry and acute security concerns, but will probably gain a foothold in other places, where domestic efforts at autonomy lag far behind.
How should the rest of the world respond? The competition risks hollowing out Western economies. Where there is evidence of Chinese dumping and subsidies, counter-measures against Chinese exports are justified and necessary. Where there are security risks action is justified, too. The data collected by robotaxis could pose a surveillance threat; Chinese pharma has suffered corruption scandals. Yet knee-jerk protectionism in the name of security or safety would be a mistake. Blocking or limiting the fruits of Chinese innovation would deprive consumers of the benefits of cheaper and better drugs and transport at a time when voters worry about affordability.
That is why it would be better for Western economies to rethink how innovation works at home. It is tempting to be fatalistic about China’s rise—to conclude that its dominance over the technologies of the future can be achieved only through authoritarian diktats and wasteful handouts, and that democracies therefore cannot follow in its footsteps. But the inventiveness of China’s private sector and agility of its regulators have been crucial ingredients, too. Here, alas, the West is going in the wrong direction.
Nothing says that China must own the future. But if the West wants to compete in self-driving cars and medicine, let alone EVs, solar power and other vital technologies, it must learn the right lessons from China’s rise. ■
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The demographic crash will hit them hard over the next 40 years. They will shrink from 1.2 billion to a little over 600 million. There’s nothing they can do about it - most of the people who will be alive have already been born, and no one is going to immigrate to China.
The Chinese want to be leaders in everything except ethics and morality.
China does not tolerate social issues as the US does, so even with their lack of technical innovation they will eventually rule.
Did the author ever notice that Chinese quality is a tad lacking in construction and other areas?
RE: Did the author ever notice that Chinese quality is a tad lacking in construction and other areas?
I remember there was a time decades ago when the term “made in Japan” meant poor quality. Not anymore.
Companies will and ought to improve or they won’t survive long.
China's Population Trajectory: A Likely Decline, But Not to 600 Million
China's population has indeed begun a historic decline, driven by decades of low fertility rates, the legacy of the one-child policy (1979–2015), rapid urbanization, and rising costs of child-rearing. Official data from China's National Bureau of Statistics shows the population peaked at around 1.412 billion in 2021 and fell to about 1.409 billion by 2024. The United Nations (UN) projects it at approximately 1.416 billion as of mid-2025, with a negative growth rate of -0.23% that year—marking the start of sustained shrinkage.
However, the notion of a “collapse” to 600 million is overstated and not supported by mainstream demographic forecasts. This figure appears to stem from outlier analyses, particularly those by demographer Yi Fuxian, who argues China's current population is already inflated (closer to 1.28 billion) due to local government overreporting for fiscal incentives.
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Yes there is something they can do about it and they are:
The Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk › business › 2025 › 10 › 12 › Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified Robotics has catapulted Beijing into a dominant position in many industries Oct 12, 2025Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified. Robotics has catapulted Beijing into a dominant position in many industries This feature is available for registered users.
After visiting a string of factories, Jim Farley was left astonished by the technical innovations being packed into Chinese cars – from self-driving software to facial recognition.
“Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned in July.
“We are in a global competition with China, and it’s not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”
Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire behind mining giant Fortescue – which is investing massively in green energy – says his trips to China convinced him to abandon his company’s attempts to manufacture electric vehicle powertrains in-house.
Other executives describe vast, “dark factories” where robots do so much of the work alone that there is no need to even leave the lights on for humans. “We visited a dark factory producing some astronomical number of mobile phones,” recalls Greg Jackson, the boss of British energy supplier Octopus.- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/10/12/why-western-executives-visit-china-coming-back-terrified/
Since the US has its own demographic crisis, due to contraception and abortion, and younger Americans overall increasingly are not even learning the skills parents had, or want to, then it will need robots as well.
Delusional.
China does not have “leadership in technology.”
“Clever those Chinese”
EV,s that constantly catch on fire and when they do the police put a screen around it so that the public can’t see it is a Chinese made EV
Most companies are owned by the CCP. There is no incentive to improve. The only incentive is to appear to improve by cutting corners and cooking the books.
“..low fertility rates, the legacy of the one-child policy...”
RE: Most companies are owned by the CCP. There is no incentive to improve.
This article talks about RoboTaxis.
The companies that develop them in the USA are Dominated by Waymo ( owned by Google/Alphabet) Tesla ( Elon Musk ), Zoox ( owned by Amazon ), Motional, and Uber/Lyft partnerships.
I don’t think any Chinese companies own them. Unless you have board of directors in these companies who are under CCP payroll.
Otherwise, the Chinese RoboTaxis have no choice but to compete against them and provide customers value for money.
RE: China does not have “leadership in technology.”
Not now, not yet. But let’s not be complacent. They’re catching up. I would never say never against a country with 1.4 billion people, many of them in the STEM field.
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