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Shi Jiangtao

China’s ability to set its own technological course in the face of sustained US export restrictions may be the key factor in the two countries’ contest over artificial intelligence (AI), a prominent analyst has argued.
Zheng Yongnian, dean of the school of public policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), made the case in his preface to The Rise of Atlas, a new book about the development of Huawei Technologies’ Atlas 950 SuperPoD computing system.
The system, which Huawei showcased at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai last month, has been described as the industry’s largest AI supernode, a type of high-powered supercluster capable of linking more than 1,000 processors.
Zheng argued that the main importance of such projects lay in showing how China was adapting to external pressures.
He described them as part of a broader Chinese effort to build the institutional and industrial capacity needed to set standards, shape ecosystems and coordinate hardware, software and applications.
“True technological autonomy is not simply about ‘having chips’, but about ‘having the ability to define the technological path’,” he wrote in the preface, which was published online last week.
Zheng placed the shift in a wider context, saying: “Competition over chips, computing power, operating systems and AI infrastructure signals a shift from being ‘driven by economic logic’ to ‘driven by security logic’.”
He argued technology was no longer just a production tool but also “structural power between nations”.
“Computing power is authority, algorithms are order, platforms are governance. These changes are reshaping the rules of competition,” he wrote.
Zheng argued that China’s challenge was not simply making breakthroughs under pressure, but sustaining them by building what he called a “technological survival structure”.
He identified three essential elements to this: control over foundational hardware, including chips and computing infrastructure; the ability to organise developer ecosystems and applications; and the industrial capacity to translate technological strength into standards and governance rules that others follow.
Without all three, he warned, China’s “independent innovation” risked becoming fragmented.


The United States has steadily tightened its restrictions on Chinese access to technology, with officials repeatedly warning that China’s advances in AI and computing power carried strategic consequences for American national security.
Huawei was first added to the US Entity List in May 2019, restricting its access to American technology and tools.
Three years later, the Commerce Department imposed sweeping export controls on advanced semiconductors, AI chips and manufacturing equipment and has since expanded them to cover other categories.
In the preface, Zheng pointed to China’s distinctive organisational model, which he described as “embedded state capacity”, in which enterprises acted both as market players and as nodes in a national technology system, enabling the rapid mobilisation of resources.
He said this path was based on system-level capability and industrial chain integrity, and differed from Silicon Valley’s market-led approach and Europe’s focus on regulatory frameworks.
He added that each model had strengths and weaknesses, with the Chinese system being effective at innovation and solving clearly defined “known problems”. But he said the highly target-driven, state-mobilised systems might prove less flexible and diverse, which raised questions about how Beijing would address “unknown problems”.
He argued that long-term resilience required openness, diversity and tolerance for failure, qualities often associated with a “marketplace of technological ideas”.
“Therefore, we can clearly say that the key to the future of China’s science and technology system lies not only in ‘whether it can achieve breakthroughs’, but also in ‘how to continuously generate breakthroughs’,” he said.
Zheng said the Atlas story was part of a larger contest over who got to define the rules and pathways of future technology or “systemic capacity competition”.
“If computing power structures are a core variable of global competition in the next decade, then victory will not rest on a single breakthrough but on whether a nation can continually organise technology, capital and institutions,” he wrote.


Studies by US think tanks have broadly echoed Zheng’s emphasis on systemic capacity and the divergence between the US and Chinese approaches to AI governance.
Earlier this year, an analysis from the Brookings Institution argued that Chinese AI labs had limited access to cutting‑edge computing capacity and capital, yet were advancing rapidly through efficiency gains, open‑source diffusion, and integration into the real economy.
Meanwhile the Centre for Strategic and International Studies argued that restrictions on advanced semiconductors might slow China but would not prevent it from achieving operational parity in many sectors, such as robotics, which rely on less high-powered chips.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The country must adapt to external pressure by building the capacity to set international standards, according to one leading commentator

The country must adapt to external pressure by building the capacity to set international standards, according to one leading commentator