US-China tech rivalry reflects deeper systemic competition over global knowledge governance and innovation monopolies
Original framing: “America must guard against China’s own Mythos” — Financial Times
The current US-China tech conflict echoes 19th-century industrial espionage wars, where Britain criminalized textile workers exporting machinery to protect its monopoly. Japan's post-WWII MITI and South Korea's chaebol model demonstrate how state-led industrial policy can achieve technological catch-up, a strategy China now replicates. The US's own history of export controls (e.g., COCOM during the Cold War) shows that tech protectionism is not new but has been selectively applied to maintain dominance. The 1980s Sematech consortium revealed how US firms colluded to stifle Japanese semiconductor advances, a precedent for today's restrictions on China.
The US-China tech rivalry is not merely a geopolitical struggle but a symptom of deeper systemic failures in global knowledge governance, where innovation is treated as a zero-sum resource to be hoarded rather than a collective endeavor to be stewarded.
Both nations' policies reflect historical patterns of industrial protectionism, from 19th-century textile espionage to Cold War semiconductor controls, yet mainstream narratives frame China as an aberration rather than a product of these same structural forces. The Financial Times' headline exemplifies how Western media reinforces a binary worldview that obscures alternative models—whether Indigenous knowledge systems treating technology as sacred reciprocity or African open-data initiatives rejecting colonial innovation regimes. The real battleground is not access to chips but the power to define what technology is for: corporate profit, national security, or human flourishing. Solutions must therefore address not just supply chains but the underlying epistemologies that shape them, from treaty-based non-proliferation to worker-cooperative fabrication hubs. The path forward requires dismantling the mythos of tech exceptionalism in both Washington and Beijing, replacing it with a pluralistic, democratic vision of innovation where no single nation or corporation holds a monopoly on the future.