Zhengyu ‘Z’ Huang’s new book, Rethinking China, opens with an ominous episode from his tenure as president of the Committee of 100, an influential organization of Chinese Americans. Senior United States State Department officials tell him that the US is engaged in “an existential struggle between democracy and autocracy, our way of life and theirs. As Chinese Americans, you must take a stand.”

Huang took a deep breath and began to reflect on the assumptions behind the rhetoric and on the importance of evidence-based analysis in addressing the most consequential geopolitical relationship of the 21st century. In this commentary, he previews several themes from Rethinking China.

The Analytical Lens

In high-stakes geopolitical competition, the quality of strategy is only as good as the evidence informing it. Yet for more than a decade, the discourse surrounding the US-China relationship has increasingly been shaped by foundational claims that are rarely tested against long-horizon data. These assumptions have become the intellectual scaffolding for policies affecting global markets, capital flows, immigration regimes, and talent mobility.

For American businesses operating in Hong Kong and across Asia, this creates an untenable paradox. Leaders are expected to make multibillion-dollar, long-duration decisions while the policy architecture itself may rest on distorted empirical foundations. In an era defined by rapid technological transformation, the stakes of policy misalignment have never been higher.

Testing the Assumptions

As a former managing director at Intel, White House Fellow, and president of the Committee of 100, I have witnessed firsthand how unverified claims can calcify into unquestioned orthodoxy.

Consider the often-repeated assertion that the United States loses USD 600 billion annually to Chinese intellectual property theft. Despite its ubiquity in congressional hearings and media coverage, the figure collapses under empirical scrutiny. The legal cases, datasets, and methodologies used to justify it lack evidentiary rigor.

The policy consequences have been profound. The Department of Justice’s 2018 “China Initiative” was framed around the belief in a “whole-of-society” threat emanating from China. But when one reviews the initiative’s actual case portfolio, a different picture emerges. Thousands of China-related investigations were opened, while many Chinese and Chinese American researchers came under scrutiny; very few were convicted of economic espionage.

The primary outcome was not the exposure of a sweeping espionage network, but the creation of a climate of fear and suspicion — one that accelerated a brain drain of top-tier STEM talent from the United States back to Asia.

This is not a trivial unintended consequence. It cuts directly against America’s most important strategic imperative.

The Global Talent Imperative

In 2026, the defining contest between the United States and China is not purely territorial, economic, or military. It is a competition over talent density. The nation that attracts, trains, and retains the world’s most exceptional scientists and engineers will define the next century.

The evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore:

• China now produces several times more science and engineering bachelor’s degrees than the United States.
• US institutions awarded roughly 45,000 science and engineering doctorates in 2023, while the latest comparable data show Chinese universities awarded approximately 53,000 in 2022.
• Chinese student enrollment in the United States has fallen from a peak of more than 370,000 students in 2019–20 to roughly 266,000 in 2024–25.
• A 2021 survey of nearly 2,000 US-based scientists found that 42.2% of scientists of Chinese descent felt racially profiled by the US government, while more than half reported fear or anxiety about government surveillance. Among non-US citizen scientists of Chinese descent, 42.1% said investigations had affected their plans to remain in the United States.

This is not an abstract concern. Chinese Americans and Asian immigrants have helped build many of America’s most important technology companies and research institutions, from Jensen Huang at Nvidia to Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneers Fei-Fei Li and Andrew Ng. Chinese American scientists and entrepreneurs have been central to American leadership in semiconductors, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, American political and technology leaders insist that the United States must “win the AI race” against China because artificial intelligence may fundamentally transform human society. They are correct. But AI is only one frontier among many. Quantum computing, robotics, nuclear fusion, biotechnology, advanced materials, and space science all have the potential to reshape the global balance of power.

The uncomfortable truth is that the United States cannot lead in these domains without dominating the global talent market. And it cannot dominate the global talent market while simultaneously signaling to many of the world’s most capable scientists that they are viewed with suspicion because of their nationality or ethnicity.

Precision as Strategy

A results-driven reassessment of US-China strategy is not softness; it is sobriety. It does not minimize legitimate concerns surrounding technology transfer, cyber intrusions, or state-directed industrial policy. Instead, it recognizes that rhetorical toughness without empirical precision is an unforced error — one that may ultimately harm the United States more than it constrains China.

If America’s own policies accelerate the departure of top scientific talent, we lose not only in Artificial Intelligence, but across every transformative technology of the coming century. The greatest long-term risk to US competitiveness is not Chinese students on American campuses. It is a policy ecosystem that increasingly treats assumptions as facts and fear as analysis.

Integrity, evidence, and analytical rigor rather than alarmism must form the foundation of a forward-looking China strategy. America’s greatest competitive advantage has always been its ability to attract the world’s best minds and make them uniquely American. If we lose the talent war, we risk losing the future and doing so by our own hand.

Zhengyu ‘Z’ Huang is the former president of the Committee of 100, a nonprofit organization of prominent Chinese Americans dedicated to advancing constructive US-China relations and promoting Chinese American inclusion. Born in Shanghai and raised in Los Angeles, Huang holds degrees in Industrial Engineering, Economics, and Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He began his career at Intel, where he led negotiations with the Chinese government. He also served as a White House Fellow under President Barack Obama, founded a financial technology firm in Shanghai, and now leads an education-focused investment firm investing in the United States. His most recent book is Rethinking China: Challenging Our Economic Assumptions and Opportunities for Lasting Prosperity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).