On October 30, 2025, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Busan, South Korea, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a bilateral meeting that captivated global attention. The atmosphere crackled with echoes of past trade wars, geopolitical tensions, and the unspoken question of global dominance. Trump, who announced the lifting of a decades-long U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing just before departing for Busan, positioned himself as a tough negotiator intent on projecting American strength. Xi, framing the relationship as one between “friends,” used the occasion to underscore China’s economic resilience. The meeting lasted just under two hours and concluded with a handshake, but no public statements from either leader. Details filtered out nonetheless: a preliminary consensus on trade issues, including a reduction of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from 57 percent to 47 percent, a suspension of Chinese export controls on rare earth elements, and progress on soybean imports and fentanyl smuggling. Trump called it an “amazing” outcome, rating it a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10, and promised a comprehensive deal would be signed “soon.”
At first glance, this appears as a diplomatic win for Trump, capping his Asia trip with a flourish. But a closer look reveals a stark reality: in the decisive arena of global competition—key technologies—the United States under Trump has little of substance to offer. China has built an innovation lead over the past decade that undermines Trump’s negotiating leverage. While the U.S. still leads in absolute spending, China dominates in breadth, depth, and deployment of technological advancement. This editorial examines the meeting against hard facts of China’s superiority in artificial intelligence (AI), 5G communications, quantum computing, electric vehicles (EVs), and semiconductors. It demonstrates why Trump sat at the table without the aces he once held. The data draw from established analyses by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which document China’s rise as the world’s innovation leader.
The Busan meeting was no accident but the culmination of months of escalation. Since Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, the U.S. administration has intensified tariffs on Chinese imports and expanded export controls on high-tech products. China responded with measures such as special fees on U.S. vessels and restrictions on rare earths—materials essential for batteries and electronics. The summit offered a breather: both sides signaled readiness for de-escalation to stabilize volatile economic ties. For Xi, it was a strategic move that highlighted China’s self-reliance, a goal advanced by initiatives like “Made in China 2025.” Launched in 2015, this policy aimed to make China independent in 70 percent of core components for high-tech products by 2025. By 2024, it had largely succeeded: Bloomberg Economics assessed the program as “broadly successful” despite U.S. sanctions. Trump, meanwhile, emphasized his personal rapport with Xi—“we’ve always had a good relationship”—and highlighted his role in regional peace efforts, such as the ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia. But beneath the rhetoric lies the core question: Can Trump halt China’s technological ascent with threats and deals? The answer is no, and the numbers speak volumes.
Let us begin with the fundamentals: innovation indices and R&D spending. In the 2025 WIPO Global Innovation Index, China cracked the top 10 for the first time and leads among emerging economies. The U.S. still ranks high, but China’s progress is staggering. In 2024, China invested 398 billion yuan (approximately 55 billion USD) in science and technology, a 10 percent increase from the prior year. Spending on basic research rose 10.7 percent to 250 billion yuan, pushing its share of total R&D to a record 6.88 percent. Globally, China’s R&D spending grows twice as fast as the U.S.: from 2019 to 2023, its growth rate nearly doubled the American pace. In absolute terms, the U.S. spent 646 billion USD on business enterprise R&D (BERD) in 2023, compared to China’s 607 billion—but adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), China already surpasses the U.S., as Chinese researchers operate at lower cost. For every 100,000 USD in R&D, Chinese firms employ 2.3 scientists, twice the U.S. figure. China employs more researchers than the U.S. and EU combined and will graduate nearly twice as many STEM PhDs by 2025. These investments—fueled by state subsidies in the hundreds of billions—have transformed China from imitator to innovator.
The proof lies in patents, the hard currency of innovation. In 2024, China filed 1.05 million invention patents, up 13.5 percent. In critical technologies, it dominates: ASPI finds China leads in 57 of 64 critical technology categories, the U.S. in just 7. The institute analyzed the top 10 percent of high-impact scientific publications and found China outperforming the U.S. across all 8 major domains—especially in energy, with 46 percent of top papers versus 10 percent for the U.S. In AI, China produces 30 percent of top publications, the U.S. 18 percent. This dominance is no fluke but the result of strategic planning: the 2017 “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” targeted global leadership by 2030, backed by billions in startup funding and state projects.
Consider artificial intelligence, the engine of the fourth industrial revolution, with applications from autonomous vehicles to military decision-making. Here, China holds a lead that defies Trump’s sanctions. In 2024, China held 60 percent of global AI patents—six times the U.S. share in generative AI. Companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—the BAT alliance—poured billions into R&D, and models like DeepSeek-V3 outperformed Meta’s Llama 3.1 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 in 2025 benchmarks for language and reasoning. DeepSeek, an open-source model, achieved comparable performance to U.S. leaders at a fraction of the cost, thanks to innovations like Mixture-of-Experts architectures. Despite U.S. export bans on Nvidia chips since 2022, China adapted: it optimizes older hardware and builds domestic accelerators. By mid-2025, China’s computing power ranked second globally, with 60 percent of worldwide AI patents. The grant rate for Chinese AI patents stands at 32 percent, reaching 45 percent at Baidu. This enables scale: China’s vast data pools—drawn from 1.4 billion citizens—train models integrated into healthcare, manufacturing, and surveillance. The U.S. leads in private innovation (e.g., OpenAI), but China’s state-coordinated approach closes the gap. AI was not explicitly discussed in Busan, yet the U.S. refusal to ease export controls underscores Trump’s weakness: he can no longer slow China’s momentum.
The picture is equally clear in 5G communications, the backbone of the connected world. 5G powers smart cities, IoT, and autonomous systems—arenas where China outpaces the U.S. Huawei, the world’s top PCT patent filer with over 6,600 applications in 2024, dominates 5G standards. China has deployed the most 5G infrastructure, with over two-thirds of global base stations. Harvard studies show China leading in high-tech manufacturing and 5G, while the U.S. led in development but faltered in scaling. China’s “Internet Plus” plan digitizes its economy, and 2024 saw a 40 percent surge in digital communications patents. This gives Beijing advantages in infrastructure like smart cities and logistics, where U.S. firms depend on Chinese components. Trump long criticized Huawei as a security risk, but export bans failed to stop it—on the contrary, China now invests in 6G research, with prototypes tested in 2025. The Busan meeting agreed on trade frameworks easing U.S. shipping burdens, but without 5G concessions, Trump left empty-handed.
In quantum computing—the next frontier for secure communications and simulations—China again leads. It operates a 1,200-mile quantum key distribution (QKD) corridor, unhackable by current standards. From 2024 to 2025, quantum-related patents exploded: China filed 80 percent of its next-generation transistor patents domestically, catching Western firms off guard. In gravitational sensors, high-performance computing, and quantum sensors, China is ahead, while the U.S. leads in atomic clocks and quantum algorithms. ASPI’s tracker shows China outperforming the U.S. by 60 percentage points in hypersonic detection, critical for military tech. China’s “Quantum Information Science” program, with 55 billion USD in 2025 R&D, aims for supremacy. Trump mentioned nuclear weapons, but quantum tech threatens conventional cryptography—a field where China is ahead. Quantum issues were untouched in Busan, highlighting Trump’s lack of leverage.
Electric vehicles and battery technology offer another arena where China disarms Trump. China controls 46 percent of top publications in energy and environment, leads in battery supply chains, and produces 70 percent of global EV batteries. BYD and CATL dominate the market with EVs that are cheaper and longer-range than Tesla models. In 2024, China’s EV exports rose 70 percent despite U.S. tariffs. The “Made in China 2025” target of 70 percent local components was met, backed by hundreds of billions in subsidies. The U.S. lags: Ford and GM lose market share, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act falls short. The meeting agreed on soybeans, but EVs remained off-limits—a sign Trump has no cards left, as China controls the supply chains.
Finally, semiconductors—the heart of all tech. The U.S. was historically strong, but China is closing in. From 2023 to 2024, semiconductor patent filings rose 42 percent to 46,591, despite U.S. bans on ASML machines and design software. China invests trillions in self-sufficiency, achieving 7-nm chips (SMIC) and AI accelerators. The U.S. CHIPS Act (52 billion USD) is reactive; China’s plan is proactive. In integrated circuits, China leads, with 80 percent of patents filed domestically. This threatens U.S. firms like Intel and Nvidia. Trump threatened more hexes, but Busan ended without tech deals—an admission of U.S. weakness.
In sum: the Trump-Xi meeting was a tactical truce, not a reset. China sets the pace in key technologies, with leads built on decades of state planning. Trump offers rhetoric and tariffs, but without innovation muscle, he lacks substance. The U.S. must pivot: boost R&D funding (e.g., scale NSF TIP to 1 billion USD), cultivate talent, and forge alliances. Otherwise, Busan will be remembered as the last U.S. attempt to brake China’s rise—futile. The world is watching, and it sees a new hegemon in the tech realm: Beijing.
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