US-China rivalry: industrial policy, vaccine diplomacy

The US Senate took a leaf out of China’s industrial policy playbook this week by passing USICA, a bill that earmarks $190bn in federal funding for strategic sectors and bears striking similarities with Beijing’s controversial Made in China 2025 plan. But despite some overlap, China’s industrial policies clearly remain far broader in scope and run a much greater risk of hindering rather than helping productivity growth. Another burgeoning area of US-China competition is vaccine diplomacy. Here China has the clear lead, at least in terms of the quantity of vaccine exports. And the ongoing surge in domestic production and vaccination rates means that China could soon flood the world with doses on a far larger scale than other countries, including the US.