Alibaba, junk site Temu and various Chinese fast fashion sites like Temu showed that China could eat Amazon’s lunch and that of our retail sector.

TikTok showed that China could build a social media app that could beat America’s dominant monopolies.

Now, AI stocks are rattled by China’s DeepSeek AI.

But there’s a major asterisk underneath “China could:”. China is not just doing this independently. Big Tech’s dirty secret, which shot into the spotlight during the brief battle over H-1B visas for foreign workers, is that it may be CalTech programmers in hoodies out front, but much of the grunt work is outsourced to India and China.

And whatever Chinese workers come into contact with goes right back to the motherland, whether that’s in the form of active spying or simply those same workers going back to China to build their own companies.

AI is simply the latest example of China using H-1B and other cheap workers to harvest America’s economic gains by stealing the technology, development, and achievements at the source.

America’s tech industry will never be competitive with China as long as it outsources its development to China.

China can boast of developing competitive products, platforms and technologies because we do most of the work and then it seizes the gains and figures out a better and cheaper way to implement them.

This is what China has always done.

We need more than tariffs or a ban on Chinese ownership, we need to reckon with the fact that we’re economically coupled to talented thieves and investors putting money into companies that rely on Chinese labor are just buying a house with no windows or doors in a high-crime neighborhood.

Labor from Communist Chinese will ultimately produce Chinese technology, not American technology.