When Xi Jinping sat down for formal talks at the White House on 24 September, he reached for a sporting image. Competition between China and the United States, he said, should be healthy and kept within bounds, “a race of catching up with one another,” not a wrestle that ends with one side pinned to the mat.

The metaphor reveals more than diplomatic language usually does. A wrestler needs to overpower his opponent. A racer needs only to run his own race — and keep moving.

China has spent the past four decades doing precisely that. For much of the post-Cold War era, the familiar story cast it as the world’s manufacturing floor. It was the place where things were assembled, packaged and shipped, while the West kept the more glamorous parts of the value chain: technology, finance, design and intellectual property. That description is becoming increasingly inadequate.

China’s manufacturing strength has not gone anywhere. In 2025, China built nearly three-quarters of the world’s electric cars and more than 80 per cent of its battery cells, and its share of the materials inside those batteries is higher still. But the more telling change lies beyond the factory floor. Batteries, electric vehicles, renewable-energy equipment, telecommunications, drones, robotics and artificial intelligence are no longer simply stories about Chinese capacity. Increasingly, they are stories about Chinese capability, about a country moving from making things to inventing, engineering and scaling them.

A country that manufactures for the world depends on the world’s technology. A country that can manufacture and develop the technology begins to shape the terms on which the world competes.

Other countries have noticed. Pew Research Center’s 2026 survey of 36 countries found China viewed more favourably than the United States in most of them, a reversal Pew had not recorded in roughly two decades of polling. The shift is striking, though its causes are disputed; some analysts read it less as admiration for Beijing than as disenchantment with Washington. And the exceptions matter. India, like Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, still views the United States more favourably. Those living closest to China’s rise, however, have reasons to regard it more warily.

China no longer needs to persuade the world that it could become a great power. It already is one. Its challenge now is different: to convince the world that its rise is not merely an economic phenomenon, but the emergence of an alternative centre of technological capability, trade and diplomatic influence.

That is why Xi’s choice of a race is more interesting than it first appears.

The metaphor quietly removes the assumption that China is chasing America. There is no starting pistol waiting for Beijing to catch up.

The panda has already found its stride. And the bison, accustomed to running on familiar ground, now has discovered that the race has changed beneath its feet.

China’s message to Washington, therefore, may not be move aside, I am coming.

It may be something more consequential: I am already running beside you. Now let us see where the track leads.

A related reflection

Power may begin as spectacle, but it rarely stays on the stage. In A Pageant of Power, the theatre of global politics takes centre stage; here, the spectacle gives way to the race itself — and to a China increasingly confident in its stride.