Commentary by Bappa Sinha
The United States’ escalating campaign of export controls, sanctions, and technology denial against China is widely described as a “great power competition” or a “new Cold War.” Such framings obscure the real stakes.
This is not simply a rivalry between two nations. It is a confrontation between two fundamentally different logics of technological development: one rooted in monopoly and rent extraction, the other in production, scale, and diffusion.
At stake is not only US primacy, but the viability of technological monopoly as the foundation of contemporary imperialism.
Lenin identified imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism. Samir Amin specified the five mechanisms that reproduce this system: technology monopoly, resource control, finance capital, communications dominance, and military supremacy.
These mechanisms work together, but technology monopoly is foundational. It enables dominance across all other domains. Intellectual property regimes, standards control, platform dominance, and control over critical chokepoints enable firms in the imperial core to extract rents far exceeding what competitive production would allow.
This monopoly structure rests on a specific global division of labour. Low-margin, energy-intensive, environmentally damaging, and labour-intensive production was progressively outsourced to the Global South, while the core retained design, branding, finance, and intellectual property.
Over time, this produced highly financialised economies in the core, increasingly divorced from production itself. Share buybacks, asset inflation, and rent extraction displaced investment in productive capacity. The result was not only deindustrialisation, but the erosion of the human capital, process knowledge, and industrial ecosystems required to sustain technological leadership.
The technology monopoly now faces disruption. US leadership in critical technologies has sharply eroded from 60 of 64 areas (2003-2007) to only 7 (2019-2023), while China rose from 3 to 57. This marks the first systematic Global South breakthrough of the imperialist technology monopoly structure.
China’s development strategy has been centred on production, not rent extraction. Through long planning horizons, state coordination, mass technical education, and disciplined capital allocation, China has systematically built complete industrial ecosystems across multiple advanced sectors simultaneously.
Crucially, the socialist state has prevented domestic capital from consolidating into monopoly forms capable of Continued on next page extracting sustained super-profits. Firms are compelled to compete on cost, quality, and process innovation rather than relying on intellectual property rents.
The US response to this challenge has been to weaponise interdependence.
Export controls on semiconductors, restrictions on advanced manufacturing equipment, bans on AI chips, and pressure on allies to align are all premised on a single assumption: that control over technological chokepoints can permanently arrest development elsewhere.
That assumption is false.
Technology is not a static commodity, but a productive force embedded in material processes, skills, and industrial systems. Where sufficient productive capacity exists, restriction does not freeze development. It compels substitution, learning, and indigenous innovation.
When the option to buy disappears, the option to build becomes unavoidable.
Bappa Sinha is a citizen, an activist and technologist whose Substack is called Dialectically.
Source: cpim.org, February 21, 2026. A much longer version of this article is available online.