America Needs Economic Warriors

Washington’s mixed track record reflects more than simply individual policies gone awry. It reflects a competition between one rival that struggles to play the long game and another that has mastered it. The United States has deployed existing tools to new challenges, often without fully anticipating the consequences. It has yet to demonstrate its ability to systematically connect dots across policy domains, develop economic war-games, and devise strategies as part of a comprehensive and effective approach to economic security.

The United States, in other words, has improvised piecemeal policies and hoped for the best, while China has fused strategic vision with institutional coordination and dedicated resources to developing the human capital needed to pull off such an approach. Washington needs to raise its economic security game. To do so, it needs to nurture a new class of economic warriors adept in the new tools of national power, resilience, and global influence.

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What many in Washington often overlook is that China’s competitive success is a function not simply of party diktats but of the resourcefulness of its trained personnel, as well. China’s 2023–2027 National Cadre Training Plan calls for officials to master global economics, supply chain resilience, dual-use technology, and financial risk via mandatory training programs using online self-study and in-person “collective training” sessions. At the Central Party School, cadres study international political economy, the Belt and Road Initiative, and China’s framework for assessing national strength. Elite universities extend the pipeline: the Seven Sons of National Defense, a grouping of public universities affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, trains technologists for strategic industries. Tsinghua University and Wuhan University offer research, advisory, and training activities related to BRI. The China University of Labor Relations trains foreign trade union leaders on Chinese economic and labor theory and practice to build solidarity among BRI partners.

This institutional architecture embodies what Dan Wang, currently a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford, has called China’s “engineering state”—a system that channels technical talent toward national economic objectives, forming an ecosystem designed to produce officials who can “win wars without fighting” by mastering markets, logistics, and technology. Chinese decision-makers have long understood that winning the geoeconomic long game requires cultivating a pipeline of top talent with breadth and depth across technology, economics, and investment.