On March 28, Seattleites and Mercer Islanders celebrated the opening of Mercer Island and Judkins Park stations of the Sound Transit 2 Line. Finally, Seattle and East Side were linked by light rail over Lake Washington. It was a joyful occasion, especially considering it was the first light rail track on a floating bridge.
However, I wondered if our celebrants ever thought of the time it had taken for Sound Transit to open these two new stations: 18 years, from the voter approval in 2008 to the connection last month. Or if they ever heard across the Pacific what China has built in the same 18 years: a high-speed rail system of 31,000 miles, connecting nearly every major city and provincial capital, enough to circle the Earth more than once.
The default thinking is that socialist system is rigid and clumsy, while capitalist system is efficient and responsive. Why then has the opposite happened, as with Seattle’s light rail vs China’s high-speed rail?
A similar belief is that socialist countries can’t innovate because they stifle independent thinking. Why then did the Soviet Union send up the Sputnik in 1957, or the world’s first astronaut Yurin Gagarin into outer space to orbit the Earth in 1968?
So, it may not be a matter of political systems, but one of priorities, or where a country puts its priorities.
China, for instance, had many unfortunate years under a series of radical socialist movements. For the communist party then, the priorities were making sure China stay red and socialist, rather than worrying about economic development. A typical slogan said it all, “We would rather eat socialist grass than capitalist wheat.”
Now, the Chinese communist party is a vastly different party as it runs stock exchanges, encourages private entrepreneurship, offers membership to millionaires, etc. Its priorities are growing China’s economy and raising Chinese people’s living standard. By doing that, the party strengthens its position and legitimacy.
Reflected in the newest Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), those priorities include specifically, for instance, AI application in the “Silver Economy,” with Humanoid Caregiver Robots, In-Home Monitoring, etc. Or the low-altitude economy as a top-tier emerging industry and market centered on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing), and urban air mobility.
But industrial policy? Your standard refrain is, “Government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers. Look at Solyndra!”
Well, didn’t you watch the just completed Artemis II, the first crewed lunar flyby mission by NASA? That was a government project. So was the Apollo program, which landed the first humans, the Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the Moon in 1969.
Besides NASA, Americans have enjoyed many big, successful, and winning government funded projects. The Interstate Highway System was 90% funded by the federal government, under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. A little earlier, in 1860s, the Transcontinental Railroad was also funded by the federal government, with massive land grants and government bonds to private companies.
The list goes on: the Manhatton Project, the Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Grand Coulee Dam; the famous labs, from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Brookhaven National Laboratory; the Human Genome Project, and ARPANET, the backbone of the modern internet, created by Department of Defense; and the Operation Warp Speed, the $18 billion COVID-19 vaccine project, under the first Trump administration.
And when we complained about the current Trump administration’s funding cuts for research, we were talking about government-run research. In 2025, more than 3,800 research grants from the NIH and the NSF were terminated or frozen. From September 2024 to December 2025, 95,000 employees had departed federal science agencies. With more funding cuts for research in Trump’s proposed 2027 budget, America would not only experience a brain drain, it would fall behind China, which heavily invests in research, as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation warned.
Yes, China. That is the reason the United States can’t just leisurely go about its business as usual and let the market decide about its economy or research. Because China, the supposedly slow tortoise of socialist planned economy, is steadily racing, catching up, and sometimes passing by the United States, the proud and fast hare of free market capitalism.
It is time Americans woke up, focus and run faster, as science and tech breakthrough are coming fast and furious out of China.
The Atlantic proclaimed on March 27, 2026 “The Shocking Speed of China’s Scientific Rise.” The author pointed out that while Trump was vandalizing America’s scientific institutions, China has built out a gigantic research apparatus at world-record speed. In 1991, the author continued, China spent $13 billion on R&D. Today, it spends more than $800 billion a year. And, the author alarmed, the Chinese government plans to grow the science budget by 7 percent each year for the next five years.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) publishes a Critical Technology Tracker, covering 74 technologies. Its 2025 update reveals that China now leads in 66 of the 74 technologies (89%), including hypersonics, batteries, AI, quantum communication, 5G/6G, synthetic biology, and rare earth processing. The U.S. currently leads in only 7 technologies, down from leading in 60 out of 64 back in the 2003–2007 period.
On the consumer front, Ehang, the first in the world to obtain a certificate for operating a pilotless aerial vehicle that can carry humans, will offer flying taxis in Chinese cities this June; Meituan, a leader in food delivery services, now is the first licensed to operate commercial drone delivery across China; and the most fun development in EV charging is the partnership between BYD, the EV giant, and KFC in China. BYD charges your EV in 9 minutes with its second-generation Blade battery while KFC serves you fried chicken!
America the hare can’t take a nap anymore. The tortoise China is charging ahead.
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