Second, the Chinese have changed their economic focus so that their economy can directly replace ours. The regime’s “Made in China 2025” policy is an attempt to go up the value chain and dominate high-tech industries like aerospace, robotics and biotech.

According to a report just released by Marco Rubio, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, China’s artificial intelligence industry has grown by 67 percent over the past year and has produced more patents than its U.S. counterparts. One estimate suggests China is investing as much as 30 times more capital in quantum computing than the U.S. My colleague Thomas L. Friedman notes that China already has the No. 1 and No. 3 drone manufacturers in the world, and it is way ahead of us on technologies like facial and speech recognition.

All this would be fine if China were simply competing, but it’s not. It’s stealing. A commission led by retired Adm. Dennis Blair and former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman estimated in 2017 that the annual loss to the U.S. economy from Chinese intellectual property theft was between $225 billion and $600 billion.

Some of the theft is done through hacking. Some of it is done by surreptitiously buying tech firms through shell companies in order to seize the technologies. Some of it is pure espionage and thuggery. Sometimes China offers to give American companies access to its markets in exchange for the technology, and then after China has digested the knowledge it closes off access. This is not competition. This is replacement.

Third, Beijing is trying to seize the controlling centers of the new tech economy. If China can set the standard for 5G communication and dominate artificial intelligence and quantum computing, then it will be able to write the rules and penetrate the fibers of our society and our lives in ways that we cannot match.