Contested ground: who is winning the US and China competition on technology and the strategic geography that underpins it? What does that tell us about strategy?

Contested ground: who is winning the US and China competition on technology and the strategic geography that underpins it? What does that tell us about strategy?

China is no longer simply the world’s factory or a fast follower in technology. It is attempting to build an enduring strategic advantage across the full architecture of industrial power: energy, compute, manufacturing, critical minerals, logistics, orbital infrastructure and advanced research. In sector after sector, the competition increasingly turns not only on who invents first, but on who can scale fastest, finance longest, tolerate dependency best, and embed their technologies most deeply into the global economy. The US and China are pursuing to a certain extent asymmetric bets. The US is racing towards what it sees as first-mover advantage on frontier AI, with a compounding effect beyond a certain level of AI capability. This is not lost on China, but its strategy is focused on getting AI embedded across the economy, delivering advantages across multiple fields as early as possible.

This Ditchley conference, held in partnership with American Ditchley and the Greentree Foundation, will gather policy makers, business and technology leaders, and other experts to examine the state of US-China competition across the combined lenses of geography, technology, and soft and hard power. Discussions will weigh which side is ahead on what, and where and how better cooperation when possible — and management of differences when not — might keep the political West united and ahead of the authoritarian challenge.