Editor's note: Ankit Prasad is a biz commentator. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.

What should be the economic policy of a nation in the 21st century? Should it be based on extortion, coercion, bullying and post-imperial rent-collection? Or should it be based on innovation, scientific & technological progress, holistic development and the common good?

One would think the answer would be obvious — but these days the correct answer needn't always be the one that's most acceptable. Certainly, the administration of the world's largest economy appears to err on the side of extortion. Since the start of 2025 a beguiling set of policy imperatives have flowed ceaselessly from the White House, all of which appear to champion a model where the government also directly participates in earning revenues and driving GDP, by hook or crook.

One bad idea after another

"Your revenues are peanuts," US President Trump had said about America's biggest businesses during a speech shortly after his "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariffs announcement in April 2025. He touted instead the tariffs allegedly collected by his administration, a flow we're witnessing in reverse now as those tariffs are refunded following the US Supreme Court striking them down.

While efforts are on to revive the tariff extortion via alternate legal contortions, other bright ideas have been floated and discarded with exhausting frequency. The low point probably was Trump's recent and quickly discarded idea for the US to levy a 20% fee on cargo ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. At this point, why even have a pretext? Why even bother to offer reasoning? Why not simply go country-by-country and demand they pay a tribute?

Mercifully, not all policymaking has reverted to such medieval logic. Most countries still believe that real growth is not achieved via get-rich-quick schemes or common thuggery. The path to progress by pushing the boundaries of human ingenuity is still as rewarding as ever, and with the confluence of multiple factors ranging from AI to the green transition, it offers profitable avenues for advancement.

This is demonstrated most notably in China, via a long list of breakthroughs and achievements in a short space of time in futuristic sunrise sectors.

Inventing the future, one breakthrough at a time

The most eye-catching of these was the spectacular recovery of the Long March-10B carrier rocket's lower stage. For this purpose, a gargantuan net contraption was sailed out to sea, capturing the returning booster via a new mechanism. The reusable rocket industry, as we all know, has been dominated by one US company — SpaceX — for the last decade. The same company recently had the largest IPO in history, demonstrating the market potential of commercial space. New players with reusable rockets will help bring down costs further, particularly with AI data centers set to enter orbit in coming years.

Back on earth, however, SpaceX's commercial space IPO and those of AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI aren't the only ones breaking new ground. Three Chinese companies from three high-tech industries are eyeing their own listings. Hangzhou-headquartered Unitree Robotics, maker of quadruped and humanoid robots which have been garnering eyeballs and wowing crowds with their acrobatics, is set for a Shanghai IPO. China's robotics prowess has been clear for all to see, demonstrated most excitingly at the 2026 robot half-marathon where bipedal robots not only fared orders of magnitude better than just a year earlier, but also broke the human half-marathon record!

Also set to debut on Shanghai's STAR market is memory chipmaker CXMT, in what is set to be Asia's largest IPO so far this year. The CXMT listing comes amid a global crunch in DRAM chips. And finally, among AI labs, Moonshot AI is reportedly eyeing a Hong Kong IPO. The Chinese AI startup is also in the news for launching the largest open-weight AI model with 2.8 trillion parameters. Moonshot's Kimi K3 is designed to tackle advanced scenarios such as long-horizon coding, knowledge work and complex reasoning. The company says Kimi K3 outperformed Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol by some metrics.

In terms of supercomputing, China's LineShine recently became the most powerful supercomputer in the world by achieving 2.198 Exaflops/second. It's the first time the US has been displaced from atop the list since 2017. And a record was also achieved in solar energy, with a new type of China-developed solar cell achieving a steady-state power conversion efficiency of 28%. In another frontier area, the first commercial surgery using an invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) device was also completed in China this July, on a patient with impaired hand mobility following a spinal cord injury sustained in a car crash 10 years ago.

When progress becomes policy

Such achievements and developments would make one think that China has hit some sort of purple patch. In reality, this is increasingly becoming the norm, and the reason can only be a conducive policy environment and a willingness to undertake grand challenges with the right energy and spirit. This attitude can be glimpsed from the China Association for Science and Technology's (CAST's) list of 30 major science and technology challenges for 2026, comprising 10 challenges and questions each from frontier science, engineering and industrial technology. These include fields such as AI, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, nuclear fusion, deep sea environments, among others.

It's an impressive concerted approach, and it is driven toward achieving results. China's AI related industries are projected to exceed 10 trillion yuan in revenue ($1.47 trillion by today's conversion rates) by the end of the 15th Five Year Plan period in 2030. The country's humanoid robot market is projected to rise to $15 billion by 2030. This continuing trend toward innovation-driven and high-quality development was emphasized by China's National Bureau of Statistics while assessing the 4.7% GDP growth rate of H1 2026.

This is all in sharp contrast to developments linked to the US and its current model of geo-economic influence. As per the IMF's latest economic outlook released in July, global growth for 2026 is projected at 3%, which is 0.1% lower than the April projection. The growth projection for the Middle East, in particular, has been slashed by 1.4% to just 1.7%. The report, which is titled "Global Economy in Crosscurrents of War and Technology" attributes the slowdown to the effects of war in the Middle East, offset by accelerated momentum in the global technology cycle. It makes clear that in economic terms, instability is bad and innovation is good.

EBITDA: Earnings before Iran war, tariffs & dubious announcements

Of course, the US remains a major player on both axes of the Instability/Innovation graph. Prevailing analysis suggests the US economy would be near recession if it wasn't for the multi-trillion dollar AI infrastructure buildout. But that is only a coincidence — it has little to do with current policy imperatives, most of which are skewed toward a warped version of neo-imperialism, with other countries just trying to steer clear.

This predicament is best summed up by a new financial metric that has gone viral in the business world. It's called EBITDA, but it's not the standard Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, Amortization. The new EBITDA for contemporary times and challenges is instead expanded as Earnings Before Iran War, Tariffs and Dubious Announcements. That's the EBITDA everyone wants to focus on.