Our China problem isn’t strength: It’s distance

As President Trump prepares for a reported visit to China, Washington will focus on the signals coming out of the meeting. It should also be asking a more uncomfortable question: How much insight into China has the U.S. already lost?

As academic exchange, business presence and research engagement with China have sharply declined, what has been lost? What is lost by the sharp reduction in Americans living and working in China, observing and feeding back a steady stream of insight into how that country is changing?

At a moment when Washington is debating tariffs, technology restrictions and economic competition with China, that gap in understanding has real consequences. Without people on the ground, even high-level engagement risks being built on an incomplete picture, shaped less by how China is actually evolving than by a Rorschach Test of how Americans fear it or hope it to be.

In 2024, Ford CEO Jim Farley returned from China, struck by the speed and sophistication of the country’s electric vehicle market. Chinese automakers, he warned, posed an existential threat to Ford. The greater surprise was not China’s progress, but that the head of one of America’s leading car companies seemed to be discovering it so late.

In the years before Farley’s visit, I had learned a great deal about China’s electric vehicle market by talking to cab drivers. They described lower prices, better battery performance and the rapid pace at which new models were appearing. These were not industry insiders — they were people making everyday purchasing decisions. Taken together, those conversations pointed clearly in one direction.

The U.S. is losing the kind of sustained........

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