"The time has come for a White House-led, public-private, comprehensive examination of American competitiveness against a clear-eyed view of China's very smart and comprehensive industrial development policies and plans," said James McGreggor today in The Washington Post.  To avoid losing our technological edge to China's industrial machine, McGreggor poses several questions that the White House and U.S. government need to answer including:

What technology do we protect and what do we share? What are our commercial strategic imperatives? How do we retool the U.S. government's inadequate and outdated trade bureaucracy? And most importantly...How do we overcome the fundamental disconnect between our system of scattered bureaucratic responsibilities and almost no national economic planning vs. China's top-down, disciplined and aggressive national economic development planning machine?

And, according to McGreggor, we have a lot to fear from China:  "Chinese policymakers are masters of creative initiatives that slide through the loopholes of the WTO and other international trade rules. Facing off against this are 30 lawyers in the U.S. trade representative's office of general counsel -- only one of whom can read Chinese." The Chinese government also has a "mandate to replace core foreign technology in critical infrastructure -- such as chips, software and communications hardware -- with Chinese technology within a decade." To combat the imminent problems posed by the China's trade practices, paired with their "indigenous innovation" policy, the United States must reevaluate how we approach both trade relations with China as well as the way in which we invest in ourselves. Read more here.