I recently spent two weeks in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen meeting with executives, engineers, AI founders, and general counsel, and I came home convinced that many Western boardrooms are working from an outdated picture of Chinese competition.
They focus on the battle between Chinese and Western companies. But the crucial contest to understand — the one underlying that battle, and giving the Chinese a powerful advantage — is the contest going on within China itself.
There, a brutally competitive domestic market is turning out excellent products at a scale and speed that tariffs and trade policy can’t stop—from humanoid robots and EVs to ships, global consumer brands, and the drug candidates that Big Pharma now licenses as a primary source of innovation. It’s that fierce internal winnowing process that is producing these super-competitors.
Meanwhile, there has been a shift in the competitive landscape that is especially important to our work at Quinn Emanuel and, I suspect, to yours too: Chinese companies have become increasingly sophisticated, confident players in U.S. courtrooms, and that is quietly erasing one of the last advantages U.S. incumbents took for granted. This isn’t a case for panic, but it is a reality every American executive and their counsel should reckon with.
It all started with a drone handing me a cup of coffee on a Shenzhen sidewalk. I hope you’ll join me, in the linked note, on the journey I took from there, as I met with the leaders of 83 Chinese private and state-owned companies.
And I hope my account of these valuable meetings holds timely, even urgent, lessons for you, as my visit did for me.
@jbqlaw