Essay
China’s Tech Obsession Is Weighing Down Its Economy
A decade of cutting-edge investment hasn’t translated into growth. October 10, 2025, 3:00 PM Comment icon View Comments ( )
A man in a coat outside of a glass office building, with high rise buildings under construction in the background.
Every day brings new headlines about Chinese tech. Maybe it’s an electric vehicle with longer-range batteries , an updated artificial intelligence model , or a humanoid robot —but the message is the same every time: China is a tech juggernaut. Some credit China’s economic model . Others believe it’s the engineer-trained leaders and hard-edged entrepreneurs who know how to work the system or the sustained transfer of tacit knowledge from the United States and others. But