Washington is widening its focus from trade disputes to whether the U.S. can keep pace as China accelerates in space, biotech, and quantum technology. Supply-chain exposure and digital insecurity keep raising the stakes since breakthroughs in those fields shape military power and everyday life.
Randy Schriver and Mike Kuiken, members of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, say the country needs “clearer eyes” about China’s pace and faster work to close gaps.
Schriver serves as chairman of the board of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security and works as a partner at Pacific Solutions LLC. He previously served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs. Kuiken serves on the commission after working for the U.S. Senate.
Schriver says the commission deliberately avoids recycling old ground. “We try not to tread the same ground over and over again,” he says, describing a mandate to focus on issues that are underreported or emerging “over the horizon.” He says that approach keeps each annual report fresh, even as earlier recommendations remain urgent.
Space is the most dramatic example of how quickly China has moved, according to Schriver. He says China “absolutely defines it as a warfighting domain” and “thinks about dominance… for the purpose of warfighting.” He says his first briefing on China’s space activities as a commissioner “blew my mind,” given the surge in launches and “the amount of kit that China has put into space.”
Kuiken says even senior U.S. military leaders have struggled to capture the scale of that shift. “General Saltzman called Chinese capability in space ‘mindboggling,’” he says. According to him, Americans still default to viewing space as exploration, while China treats it as an operational domain where conflict could begin. He warns China is “coming at about 150 miles an hour in space,” and he says the acceleration “is going to sneak up on us if we don’t really think about the space ecosystem in a way that is thoughtful and deliberate.”
Biotechnology and quantum computing present similar challenges, according to Kuiken, because policymakers often lack basic fluency. “One of the biggest challenges is literacy,” he says. Kuiken argues China has built “the infrastructure layer” of the biotech sector and warns the implications extend far beyond pharmaceuticals. He says biotech could become “a general purpose technology,” with influence flowing to whoever controls the “coding language… the four letters of DNA.” Quantum also suffers from misunderstanding, he says, because “quantum information science is actually three things… quantum computers, quantum communications and quantum sensing.” Kuiken says China leads in quantum communications and ties the issue directly to security. “The entire internet is built on public key encryption,” he says. “And a quantum computer will put that at risk.”
Supply chains bring the competition back to practical vulnerability. Schriver says U.S. reviews have repeatedly “underestimated the pace” of China’s progress. He says the United States “can’t be complacent,” even though he prefers America’s innovation model, because Beijing can “direct extraordinary resources in targeted areas.” Schriver says the country faces “a vulnerability that we can no longer tolerate,” and he warns visibility often collapses when contractors “lost all visibility” beyond a few tiers of suppliers.
Taiwan remains central in Schriver’s view, even in a report focused on emerging technology. He urges readers to examine what the commission says about Taiwan and the “legal requirement to maintain the capacity [to] resist force,” along with steps Congress can take to identify gaps if a crisis invites “opportunistic aggression.”
