China’s industrial policy has worked better than critics think

EARLY IN ITS trade dispute with China, America declared that Chinese industrial policy was a form of “economic aggression”. America’s negotiators hoped to rein it in. No such luck. The very week in December that America and China announced a mini-deal on trade, China’s president, Xi Jinping, vowed that the Chinese government would do more in 2020 to support strategic sectors, ranging from robotics to biomedicine. Having seen its vulnerability to American export controls, China is more determined to build up its domestic abilities than it was before the trade war began.