If China dominates the 21st-century economy, its industrial policy will get a lot of the credit. The state’s efforts to cultivate new industries, breed winners and foster technological advances inspire awe and anger from outside observers. Kyle Chan of Princeton University recently compared China’s policies to the Manhattan Project, which invented the atomic bomb. On present trends, he argues, “the battle for supremacy” in artificial intelligence (AI) will be fought not between America and China but between leading Chinese cities like Hangzhou and Shenzhen.
