The Paradigm Shift in America's China Competition — From Macro-Level Maneuvering to Precision Strikes on Individual Firms

2018 was a watershed that went largely unnoticed at the time. That year, the United States launched its trade war against China and simultaneously began a comprehensive crackdown on Huawei — two events happening in the same year, yet carrying very different significance. The trade war belonged to the familiar toolkit of great-power contestation: tariffs, exchange rates, confrontation at the macro level — contests with rules to follow and history to draw upon. The campaign against Huawei, by contrast, opened a new form of competition: great-power rivalry had begun to reach all the way down to the level of individual firms.

In an interview with Beijing Daily on June 19, Li Wei, associate dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University of China, offered a clean framework for this paradigm shift. His core judgment: US competition with China is undergoing a paradigm leap — from macro-level maneuvering to precision strikes on individual firms — and the fundamental driver of this shift is a competitive logic holding that "the rise and fall of nations depends on the rise and fall of industries, and the rise and fall of industries depends, to a large extent, on the rise and fall of super-enterprises."

Two Screening Criteria

Li Wei's analysis lays out explicit criteria for how Washington selects its targets — criteria far more precise than the description usually heard, "going after Chinese high-tech companies." The firms truly in the crosshairs meet one of two conditions: either they are among China's very best enterprises, as judged by their standing in their industry, or they pose a "substantive competitive challenge" to the United States. The latter is a dynamic standard: as the technology gap between China and the United States narrows, the list of qualifying companies keeps growing.

From Huawei to Chinese telecom carriers, from artificial-intelligence firms to new-energy vehicles, and now to printed circuit boards (PCBs), the most recent object of scrutiny — the expansion of this list clearly reflects the scanning logic of US security reviews. It is not ticking boxes on a fixed roster; it is tracing the industrial chain link by link, and wherever it finds Chinese firms holding a competitive advantage at some node, that node is pulled inside the perimeter of review.

A Three-Layer Leap from Macro to Micro

This paradigm shift did not happen in a single stride. Li Wei's interview effectively sketches three ascending layers:

Layer One: The Instrument Layer

A move from blunt instruments such as tariffs to sharp ones such as the Entity List. A tariff raises the overall export costs of an entire industry; the Entity List can strike a single firm precisely and sever specific nodes in its supply chain. Sharp instruments are more controllable, more reversible, and less visible — Washington can choose when to tighten and when to loosen.

Layer Two: The Target Layer

A drop in dimension from "industries" to "firms." The granularity of competition has become finer — no longer aimed at "China's semiconductor industry," but at specific companies such as Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) and ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT). This change of dimension means a change in the logic of competition: what was once industrial policy confronting industrial policy has grown precise enough to assess, one company at a time, each firm's technology roadmap, market share, and supply-chain vulnerabilities.

Layer Three: The Standard Layer

A narrative upgrade from "economic threat" to "security threat." Li Wei points out in particular that twenty-first-century technological development has produced one objective trend: the boundary between civilian and military technology is growing ever more blurred, and many civilian technologies can generate "security spillover effects." This means Washington can keep expanding the definitional boundary of "security threat," drawing more and more civilian technologies and products into its review framework. PCBs are the paradigm case: in themselves, a general-purpose electronic base material — yet in current narratives they are defined as a security hazard that "could cause a missile to fail in flight."

The Warning of PCBs: The Securitization Logic of Civilian Technology

The newly scrutinized Chinese PCB sector is the best cross-section for understanding this paradigm shift. The printed circuit board is an extraordinarily fundamental electronic component — nearly every electronic device needs one, from smartphones to missiles. When Li Wei speaks of the "security spillover effects of civilian technology," PCBs supply the textbook case:

A civilian technology in which China has already formed a complete industrial ecosystem and holds the bulk of global production capacity is pulled into the sights of security review on the strength of a worst-case assumption — that "malicious components could be implanted." What matters in this chain of logic is not the nature of the technology itself, but the worst-case assumption: once security anxiety passes a certain threshold, any Chinese technology holding a dominant position in a supply chain can be securitized through such an assumption.

The Mirror of "No Enemy in the Heart"

The maxim Li Wei cites — "If you have no enemy in your heart, you are invincible under heaven; if you have an enemy in your heart, everything under heaven becomes your enemy" — actually reveals a deeper mirror within the analytical framework: the speed at which Washington's firm-level crackdown on China expands runs roughly in step with America's anxiety about its own relative decline. This is not to say there is anything wrong with the expansion of Chinese enterprises themselves — but when the anxious party examines every technological competition through a security lens, the boundary of securitization is bound to keep moving outward.