Esade Experts Warn Technological Decoupling Between China And The United States Threatens Investment Decisions

Geopolitics experts gathered at Esade warned that technological decoupling between China and the West poses a major challenge to investment decision-making for companies and governments in developed countries, and they described the risk of "Cold War 2.0 between China and the United States."

“The potential technological decoupling between China and the West poses a major challenge to investment decision‑making by companies and governments in developed countries”

Esade

At the Esade Madrid session titled "Technology and Innovation, Keys for Deflation and Productivity," Emma Fernández said "Europe has lost the leadership it once had with the deployment of mobile networks," and Raquel Jorge argued that the key question is "which of the two has the monopoly on that technology."

Esade

The same Esade discussion tied the technological competition to the United States’ quantum computing spending, with Carlos López-Blanco stressing that "the arena where global technological hegemony is being played out is not artificial intelligence, but quantum computing" and that the United States invests $3.3 billion a year.

María Sicilia added that for most technologies, especially quantum, "a lot of energy is needed," and she pointed to cost comparisons including that Europe pays seven times more than the United States for gas and three times more than China for electricity.

In parallel, the Esade panel framed the wider investment stakes as Europe and companies being "obliges its countries and companies to invest more in technology" while the long-term outlook could involve "two divergent technological ecosystems."

A separate analysis framed the United States as accelerating a global risk-reduction process, arguing that appeasing Donald Trump "buys time, but it does not substitute for the need to protect against a rogue superpower."

It said Denmark and Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve (the Fed), can attest to the limits of appeasement, while also claiming Trump’s open attack on the Federal Reserve’s independence is fueling arguments about diversification.

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The piece described how investors can anticipate "an era of rising U.S. inflation and a dollar in decline," and it warned that large foreign capital outflows could quickly erase easy gains from short-term rate cuts.

It also argued that the game is zero-sum, stating "A loss for the U.S. represents a gain for China," and it pointed to countries in the American hemisphere including Canada moving closer to Beijing.

In that context, the article said Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, will make a stop in China before heading to Davos, and it described Canada’s export strategy as seeking to lower the share of exports destined for the U.S. to below 50%.

Another account challenged the idea of a clean economic split, arguing that "every round of tariffs, export controls, and investment filters" has been accompanied by new capital flows that "consolidate the economic interdependence" between the United States and China.

“It is often said that every new restriction on trade between the United States and China separates the two economies, or at least that is what conventional wisdom dictates”

Política Exterior

It described the pattern as "capital realism," saying that tariffs and geopolitical crises "reconfigure" a stable system rather than interrupt it, and it argued that trade between the United States and China "remains significant" despite tightening restrictions.

The same analysis used Vietnam as an example, stating that its total trade surpassed $900 billion in 2025 with exports near $470 billion, and it said U.S. imports from Vietnam have surged in the last decade with a growing share of electronics and components.

In a separate Asian perspective, Sylvia Ma wrote that talk of US-China decoupling is getting loud but "neither side is ready for a clean break," and she pointed to financial links that make a true decoupling difficult.

That Asian piece also described how Beijing fortified its financial moats by building alternative payment systems and diversifying away from the US dollar, while experts said "the underlying financial plumbing between the world’s two largest economies remained too deeply entangled."