In our national discourse, it’s easy to retreat into comfortable tropes: “China bad,” “free markets good,” and “the next G is just around the corner.” But none of that is a plan. We need more than another slogan; America needs a real, tangible, industrial strategy. And it starts with a hard-nosed look at how China’s approach to 5G and smart manufacturing is reshaping the global balance of power.
Let’s be clear: China’s rise is no longer just a story of cheap labor. That era is over. Today, a growing fraction of. It’s a productivity story now, driven by robotics, industrial AI, and, most crucially, advanced 5G infrastructure deployed as an China’s manufacturing strength lies in its ability to deploy high-end, labor-light, automation-heavy processes at scale industrial platform — not just as a consumer gimmick.
While the United States focused on consumer streaming, designed to supercharge smart factories and logistics hubs. In the U.S., we’ve built fewer than 3,000 — and many of those are still on LTE. The results speak for themselves: . And these aren’t just imported systems — they’re increasingly homegrown, with Chinese firms supplying 50% of their domestic demand .
That is what a strategic, forward-looking industrial policy looks like.
Compare this with our own policy environment, where even the best private sector players are hamstrung by outdated regulations, capricious permitting processes, and the dogma that government shouldn’t pick winners — especially in telecom or manufacturing. That ideology might have made sense in the 1990s, but it’s lethal to the future of our telecommunications industry now, and in consequence, our manufacturing future.
We must discard the fantasy that subsidies are simply handouts and that governmental support for domestic industry equates to protectionism. The Chinese model turns that narrative on its head. They’ve shown that strategic investment in communications infrastructure doesn’t just benefit domestic consumers — it creates the foundational capabilities that other nations rely on, allowing for the projection of Chinese global influence. They’re exporting smart manufacturing to Mexico, Hungary, Brazil, and, increasingly, to us — leaving our vital security interests at their mercy
Meanwhile, in America, the most common consumer-facing 5G “innovation” is home internet. That isn’t the transformation consumer experience we were promised, and it’s no substitute for the advanced manufacturing we need.
The truth is that next-generation industrial networks aren’t about slightly faster Netflix downloads. They’re about enabling a new paradigm: robotic arms that integrate with self-driving carts, AI-driven quality control, and factories that operate like software systems. We can’t preserve jobs by refusing to modernize. We need industrial suites that magnify every worker’s productivity. At our ports, automated cranes and AI-coordinated logistics are beginning to replace entire teams of longshoremen, moving containers faster, safer, and with fewer errors. This is the industrial future — not speculative, but already underway elsewhere. They’re about combining the “world of atoms” with the intelligence of the digital world.
If we fail to engage with this reality, we won’t just fall behind China — we’ll fall behind ourselves. The America that built the power grid, the interstate highway system, and the Apollo program would be unrecognizable today in a country where freight efficiency and spectrum access are treated like bureaucratic chores instead of national imperatives.
Let’s put this in context. The U.S. holds roughly a third of the world’s investable capital a nd over a third of the world’s millionaires. We have the financial firepower. What we lack is the vision. We need leadership willing to tell Wall Street that building smart factories, not just SaaS platforms, is a worthy and profitable use of capital. We need the federal government to clearly articulate must-have capabilities and develop incentives to deliver them.
We’ve seen sparks of hope — start-ups in space tech and smart hardware, and a renewed interest in domestic manufacturing but these efforts must scale and diversify. To do that, we must strip away the deadweight of 1970s-era regulation and embrace a new era of American abundance, grounded in infrastructure and capacity, not austerity and scarcity.
America’s economic power has always come from its ability to harness both capital and labor, to organize both men and machines, and to build systems that multiply human potential. The productivity booms of the past — from 1870 to 1950 — were not accidents. They were the direct result of strategic infrastructure investments: roads, power grids, water systems, and factories.
We must ask: what is the equivalent of that today? It’s not another social app. It’s not an ESG report. It’s smart, sensor-laden manufacturing floors. It’s freight rail optimized by real-time networks It’s energy grids that balance loads with machine learning. It’s bringing computation into the physical world in ways that finally show up in the productivity stats.
The future of global industry is being written right now — in factories, labs, and telecom infrastructure. The question is: will it be written in Shenzhen or in America?
The choice is ours. Either we rise to this challenge or cede the commanding heights of global manufacturing and industrial intelligence to those who already understand what’s at stake.
This isn’t about beating China for the sake of it. It’s about making America what it should have always remained: the most innovative, productive, and prosperous nation on Earth. We should not be content to play second fiddle, when our technological prowess is unmatched.
Let’s get serious. Let’s get building. Let’s lay the foundations for decades more of American prosperity.