Editor's note: Michael Tai is professor of development studies at the Beijing Institute of Technology and author of "U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century: A Question of Trust." The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily those of CGTN.

If the current trade war aims to hold back China's development, it may perhaps already be too late. Regardless of the outcome of the ongoing trade tensions, China will almost certainly continue its present trajectory. Here's why.

Firstly, China has already reached the critical mass of technological capacity. It has moved from imitator to innovator, and has become world leader in areas such as solar energy, mobile payments and high speed rail. 

In 2011, the Royal Society saw the landscape changing "dramatically" when China overtook the UK to become the second leading producer of research publications. Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google China and an expert on artificial intelligence, believes China is rapidly becoming a global leader in AI and may surpass the United States. 

5G is only one of several crucial technologies where the U.S. has fallen behind due to policy missteps. By deciding against a single telecommunications standard, the U.S. fragmented its telecoms industry and has no 5G contender today. The fastest supercomputer, the largest radio telescope, and the first landing on the dark side of the moon are more feathers in the Chinese cap.

Secondly, the size of the Chinese domestic market provides important advantages when it comes to innovation. China has the world's largest fintech market where digital payments are 50 times larger than the U.S. while Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, its three biggest internet companies, are investing in machine learning and artificial intelligence. 

AI is built on big data, and because of its vast number of users, China has caught up to the U.S. at an unexpected pace. Economies of scale allow quicker recovery of R&D and tooling expense which translates into cost advantage over rivals, especially in sectors requiring heavy front-end investments such as high-speed rail, nuclear power plants, solar panels, power turbines, electric vehicles and drones. 

Contrary to popular belief, China's advantage is no longer low-cost labor but its efficient logistics and enormous pool of tooling engineers able to turn blueprints into prototypes sometimes in a matter of days.

Nevertheless, there is nothing original or unique about the Chinese development model. China is essentially replicating many of the policy features of Japan, South Korea and Singapore at an earlier developmental stage when the state steered the economy and controlled key sectors such as banking, telecommunications, steel and energy. 

Indeed, the state-led model was practiced by the United States, Britain, France and Germany too during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang cogently points out. Consider President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs to spur the U.S. economy in the 1930s or French state ownership of and intervention in key industry sectors up until today.

But China's rise in tandem with the Asian Tigers is also powered by cultural character, a factor often overlooked by economists. If England is a nation of shopkeepers, to quote Adam Smith, China is a nation of entrepreneurs. Chinese business sense first caught the attention of Europeans in the colonies of Southeast Asia.

British colonial officer Francis Light observed that "they possess the different trades of carpenters, masons, and smiths, are traders, shopkeepers and planters...[and] are the only people of the East from whom a revenue can be raised without expense and extraordinary efforts of Government..." American anthropologist and explorer David P. Barrows considered the way "their keen sense for trade and their indifference to physical hardship and danger, make the Chinese almost a dominant factor whenever political barriers have not been raised against their entry."

Confucian virtue can be compared to the Weberian Protestant ethic. The Chinese language is full of maxims exhorting learning and hard work, and anyone who has been to China will not fail to notice the way hardship is accepted as a normal part of life. 

Barbers are on their feet 12 hours a day while the repair of shoes and clothing to mobile phones and computers is easily and affordably available. To stay ahead of the competition, some companies practice a "996" work regime (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) – the subject of vigorous debate on Chinese social media recently.

Hong Kong tycoon Robert Kuok calls the Chinese the "most amazing economic ants on earth" but their success invites both admiration as well as envy and angst.

In 19th century America, white Americans saw Chinese immigrants who first came to work on the transcontinental railroads as a serious competitive threat and lobbied Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 which effectively barred Chinese from the United States for the next several decades while anti-miscegenation laws prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women. 

The act was repealed in 1943 but quotas (permitting 105 Chinese persons per year) and a ban against the ownership of property and businesses by ethnic Chinese remained in place until 1965. President Trump's tariffs and entity list represent the latest round of exclusion which may succeed in delaying but not derailing China's development.

(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com)