US No Longer Embraces Innovation: China Does

For much of its history, the United States leaned toward the latter.

Historian Merritt Roe Smith catalogs that era’s optimism in book titles like Eighty Years’ Progress of the United States and Triumphs and Wonders of the 19th Century.

Meanwhile, in the United States, laws such as Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, often considered the country’s most stringent biometric privacy law, constrain deployment.

While America’s aging grid holds back expansion, between 2022 and 2025, China added capacity equivalent to that of industrial power sources across the entire United States.

2025 marked the fourth consecutive year that China’s State Council approved 10 or more reactors.