The United States and China

The world's two largest economies are each other's main rival and one of each other's main customers. The United States is trying to keep its lead in technology, finance and military power; China is trying to close the gap and to end its dependence on American technology and the dollar. They fight with tariffs, export bans, blacklists and subsidies rather than weapons, and every few months their leaders meet to keep the contest from breaking the trade that both still need. Taiwan, where the rivalry could become a war, has its own page.

Where it stands · September 2026

A second meeting this year between the two presidents is being prepared; Beijing has threatened to cancel it if Washington approves new arms sales to Taiwan. The two are negotiating a reciprocal cut in tariffs, while Washington weighs new ones on goods it says China overproduces. Chinese rare earth firms have halted some shipments to the United States. Xi Jinping has spent the month at summits of the non-Western groupings, proposing among other things a shared open-source zone for artificial intelligence.

What the dispute is about

Who leads. The United States has been the largest economy and the strongest military power for longer than anyone alive can remember, and the system of trade and finance was built around it. China is the first rival in a century large enough to change that.

Technology. Whoever leads in chips, artificial intelligence and clean energy will lead in both wealth and weapons. America restricts what China can buy; China restricts the minerals everyone needs to make it.

The terms of trade. China sells the world far more than it buys. Americans call the surplus the product of subsidy and closed markets; Chinese call it the product of work and investment.

Each side says it does not seek to change the other's system. Neither believes it.

How each side explains it

Washington's account

America opened its market and brought China into the trading system on the promise that it would open and liberalise in turn. Instead China took technology by theft and by forcing foreign firms to hand it over, subsidised its industries until competitors elsewhere died, and floods the world with goods its own people cannot afford to buy. It fuses its companies with its military, watches its citizens, threatens its neighbours, and means to displace the United States. Keeping the most advanced technology out of its hands and bringing critical industries home is prudence, late.

In our coverage

China is a strategic competitor; firmness, derisking and export controls justified →1016 headlines
Covered by:Reuters · Bloomberg · Nikkei Asia · The Information · Financial Times · Wall Street Journal

Beijing's account

China rose by the rules it was given, by the labour of its people, and lifted hundreds of millions from poverty. Now that it competes at the top, the rule-maker breaks the rules: tariffs by decree, blacklists, a technology blockade, all in the name of national security. The aim is to hold China down, as foreign powers did for a century. China wants cooperation and offers it; it will answer pressure in kind, and the blockade has only taught it to build everything itself.

What each account leaves out

Washington's leaves out how much American companies and consumers gained from the arrangement they now call a mistake; that America subsidises its own chips and cars and spies on the world's communications; and that each ban has so far produced a Chinese substitute.

Beijing's leaves out the markets it kept closed to foreign firms, from banking to the internet; the convictions in courts for stolen technology; the trade punishments it has dealt to Australia, Lithuania, South Korea and Japan; and factories that produce far more than any market can take.

Those in between leave out how well many of them have done from playing each against the other.

The ledger