Recently, I read two science-fiction novels, both of which treated of future competition/conflict between the United States and China.
Travis Taylor's Warp Speed, apparently a first novel, has an American renaissance-man scientist developing a totally new means of space travel. The Chinese steal this technology and use it to launch a kinetic-missile attack on the United States; but our hero, being smarter than the Chinese, figures out how best to use this technology and essentially destroys China as a nation.
Veteran John Varley gives us Red Thunder, apparently inspired by Robert Heinlein's sixty-year-old boys' novel Rocket Ship Galileo. When it becomes apparent that the Chinese are going to beat the United States to Mars, a group of young people in Florida use another new technology to build their own space ship and in turn beat the Chinese to Mars.
So ... two books in which we beat the Chinese, as is only just and right. And how do we do this? Easy! We use a whole new technology, a deus ex machina created by the author to let us win. In other words, magic.
I have nothing against using magic to defeat an enemy. You can still find a few people in esoteric circles in Great Britain who will claim that they participated in the great magical working that turned Hitler back from his intention to implement Operation Seelöwe and invade the island; if this is what actually happened, more power to them. But I prefer my magic to be really magic, and my technology to be really technology; and both these books are using a form of "magic" which is more like a prestidigitator pulling a rabbit out of a hat — except that we start out with no rabbit and no hat to pull it out of.
It is a little disconcerting to find what may not yet be a trend in science-fiction, the idea that if we are going to come out ahead in a competition with the Chinese we must depend on the technological equivalent of magic. Is there no other way?
(Otherwise, the approaches to this competition by Taylor and Varley are quite different. Taylor's Chinese, being not only evil but also stark staring mad, launch an unprovoked attack on their largest trading partner, and thus guarantee, one way or another, their destruction. Varley's Chinese on Mars, faced immediately after landing with a bunch of American kids in a super dune buggy, take this in good part, and everyone — with perhaps one or two exceptions — gets along just fine.)