Wall Street and the U.S. VC industry have mostly ignored China’s guidance funds. But anyone interested in the future of U.S.-Chinese economic competition—or maybe just the future—should not. Guidance funds involve subsidies to industry through equity investments; unlike previ­ous Chinese methods of delivering subsidies through cheap loans or outright grants, they involve some market involvement. Guidance funds also show the enormous resources China is directing toward industrial policy, and the country’s ambitions to not just catch up with, but to actually surpass, the United States in advanced technology…

Operation Warp Speed1 (OWS) was launched on May 15, 2020. A partnership between the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Defense (DoD), other agencies, and the private sector, its goal was to “accelerate the testing, supply, development, and distribution of safe and effective vaccines, therapeutics, and diag­nostics to counter Covid-19.” As a result…

The Covid-19 crisis exposed the stark fact that almost everything we use—and need—is no longer produced in the United States. For example, 95 percent of surgical masks and 70 percent of respirators used in the United States are produced abroad. Indeed, according to some accounts, in a single year (2004), surgical masks went from being 90 percent domestically produced to 95 percent foreign produced when Kimberly-Clark shut down its U.S. factories and offshored its production…