Last week while discussing Sino-US rivalry, we concluded the improbability of a war over Taiwan. And although the US leads in many critical sectors, China is rapidly closing the capability gap, as capacity or scale has never been a problem for Beijing. This piece will discuss additional facets of Sino-US competition.

The comparison of both countries' national power potential (NPP) becomes confusing, as there are strong arguments on both sides which gravitate to declare either side a winner. In the May-June 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kurt M Campbell and Rush Doshi argue that China has the advantage of 'scale and mass' compared to a 'strategically distracted and politically paralysed US'.

They define 'scale' as the ability to use 'size' for generating efficiency and productivity to outcompete rivals. They dispel the notion that 'an aging, slowing, and increasingly nimble China would not overtake an ascendant US in due course of time.' They make the case that on many critical metrics, PRC has already outmatched the US. And even if China falters and slows down, as many pundits believe, it remains formidable technologically, militarily and economically.

For China, scale or 'quantity has a quality all its own' as the Soviet leaders used to say about the USSR. To undo the Chinese advantage of scale — the cited writers recommend - Washington should revamp its alliances, shunning the legacy approach of treating allies as 'dependent recipients of protection'; and instead consider its alliance architecture as a collection of 'managed relationships' for pooled and integrated capacity across military, economic and technological........

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