This week’s summit in Beijing showed how China sees itself as America’s equal. Only by rejecting the extremes and embracing commonsense solutions can America win the battle for the 21st century.

President Trump returned from Beijing this morning after two days of meetings with Xi Jinping that were heavy on the pageantry you would expect from a meeting of the world’s two most powerful men. There was a state dinner at the Great Hall of the People, a walk through Tiananmen Square, and Trump calling Xi “one of the World’s Great Leaders.” While it was encouraging that both sides announced they would pursue what they called a “constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability,” beyond that, no major breakthroughs were unveiled before Air Force One lifted off.

Pundits will debate what the pomp and circumstance of the visit signified, but to us, the story of the actual U.S.-China competition is unfolding elsewhere – be it inside research labs, factories, shipyards, or electrical grids on both sides of the Pacific. In all those places, China is catching, matching or exceeding us.

Since the conclusion of World War II, the U.S. has been the world’s undisputed economic and technological leader. Our government invested in education and cutting-edge research. Our private sector, our research universities, our immigration pipeline, and our capital markets ran far ahead of every other country. In recent years, American innovators and businesses have continued to thrive despite growing dysfunction in DC. They operated under the assumption that the political class could fight, posture, and shut things down without much real-world cost. But China, particularly under Xi Jinping, has had its sights set for a long time on displacing America atop the global world order.

Former President Joe Biden often spoke publicly about his private conversations with Xi Jinping. In Biden’s retelling, Xi told him that “democracies cannot be sustained in the 21st century, autocracies will run the world. Things are changing so rapidly. Democracies require consensus, and it takes time, and you don’t have the time.” We do not have to take Xi at his word to take him seriously. He is governing as if he believes it and betting that the United States cannot get out of its own way long enough to compete.

Unfortunately, Xi has reason to believe the world is moving his way. In the U.S., trust in the federal government sits at 17 percent according to Pew Research, one of the lowest readings since the question was first asked in 1958. Congressional disapproval hit 86 percent last month, tying the record high. We just lived through the longest federal shutdown in our history. Six states have already redrawn their congressional maps mid-decade, the largest coordinated mid-decade redistricting push since the 1960s. Every one of these anecdotes about the troubled state of our democratic system of government is a story we are telling Xi Jinping about ourselves.

Neither end of our political spectrum has a serious answer to any of this. The far left wants to wage class war on the same businesses and capital markets that built America’s global leadership in the first place. Among populist Republicans, the impulse runs in the other direction, toward retreating from the world and tearing down the universities, immigration system, and alliances that drew global talent to our shores. Neither extreme has any plan to outcompete China in this century.

The Republicans and Democrats in Congress No Labels works to champion know what the agenda actually looks like. Things like fixing the immigration system to capture the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs’ that other countries are now actively recruiting away from us. Investing in workforce development for the industries we want to dominate. And getting serious about the national debt before interest payments crowd out our ability to do anything else.

Xi spent this week watching American power up close. He has been telling people for years that democracies cannot match what he is building. The argument we have been making back to him is one of self-inflicted dysfunction. Changing that argument means getting back to work on the problems we have neglected for too long.