A federal judge’s decision this month to stop the U.S. Defense Department from blacklisting a Chinese biotech firm was the latest demonstration of the lopsided legal contest between the United States and China.

The Pentagon had determined that WuXi AppTec, a major pharmaceutical contractor headquartered in Shanghai, was helping to support China’s military modernization and sought to place restrictions on the company. WuXi AppTec responded by going to an American court—and winning.

The ruling was a setback for the Pentagon’s attempts to weaken China’s policy of military-civil fusion, a national strategy to allow its defense sector to capitalize on civilian technologies, but it also exposed a soft spot in America’s armor: the institutions at the core of the U.S. political system can protect America’s adversaries too.

That imbalance extends far beyond one biotech company. From sanctions and tariffs to intellectual property and national security cases, Washington is competing against an authoritarian rival while remaining constrained by courts, due process and rules that its rival is under no obligation to reciprocate.

What Happened to Wuxi AppTec?

The latest example follows the Pentagon determining in June that WuXi AppTec was one of 188 entities supporting China’s efforts to modernize its military. The list also included e-commerce giant Alibaba, electric carmaker BYD and robotics firm Unitree for the first time.

WuXi AppTec’s inclusion on the Section 1260H watch list of “Chinese military companies” meant the U.S. military could no longer do business with it, and the restrictions would extend to third-party suppliers next year.

But James Boasberg, chief judge at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who has clashed with the Trump administration before, said the Defense Department lacked evidence to support its designation of the firm, which earned 72 percent of its revenue last year—some $4.6 billion—from U.S. clients.

The court concluded that the department had misrepresented a portfolio investment in the company as ownership by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the state-owned manufacturer of Chinese military aircraft and jet engines.

It made WuXi AppTec the latest Chinese company to defeat the U.S. government, thanks to another part of the U.S. government.

Kyle Chan, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, said: “It’s a testament to the strength and fairness of the US court system that a Chinese company can sue the US government—and win.”

It Was Never Going to Be Fair

President Donald Trump, who may prefer efficiency over bureaucracy, has had his fair share of knockbacks from U.S. courts, including failed attempts in 2020 to ban TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat.

A year later, the Pentagon’s blacklisting of electronics company Xiaomi and geospatial data firm Luokung Technology was also struck down by the U.S. legal system.

In February, the U.S. Supreme Court stood in the way of Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs worldwide, and principally against China, to compel favorable trade negotiations. His administration has since pivoted to new Section 301 tariffs, justified by alleged forced labor practices, but those can be challenged too if the standard of proof is not met.

“One of western democracies’ potentially fatal flaws is the tendency to prize process above outcomes (and some would say above common sense),” James Lewis, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in a post about WuXi AppTec’s federal court win.

Words like oversight, due process and the burden of proof are unlikely to bother the leaders of China’s long-ruling Communist Party, who already view American-style democracy as uncontrolled chaos and see government transparency and public accountability as fatal weaknesses.

Pekingologists say Beijing is so averse to the Western democratic model and the threat it poses to its legitimacy that it is actively trying to redefine democracy on its terms, at the United Nations and in other international forums.

Not long after the Defense Department added some of China’s biggest companies to its expanded watch list, the Chinese government retaliated with its own restrictions on 10 U.S. private firms with active defense contracts.

The American companies, which have no recourse under the Chinese legal system, will remain blacklisted until Beijing says otherwise.

One day, they, along with other wrongfully detained Americans, may be traded for U.S. concessions, like Canada’s two Michaels were in 2021 in exchange for Huawei “princess” Meng Wanzhou.

Those of a realist persuasion have long known this imbalance to be true.

Even this spring, while Iran was launching missiles and drones at random ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. military went through formal channels to give notice of its upcoming blockade against Iranian ports, in compliance with the law of naval warfare.

Get Used to It

Many have seen the irony of fighting an era-defining superpower rivalry without reciprocity. And in the race to lead in emerging technologies, the asymmetry could be the difference between winning and losing.

The White House has publicly backed claims by the American AI company Anthropic that Chinese startup Moonshot AI used intellectual property theft of its advanced Fable model to create its competitive Kimi K3 agents.

Anthropic famously paid a $1.5 billion settlement for copyright infringement but remains largely helpless against Beijing-based Moonshot’s tactics.

“Anthropic was sued in an American court and paid the largest copyright settlement in history. There is no forum in which Moonshot will pay anything for its successful extraction and replication of Anthropic’s trade secrets,” Ryan Fedasiuk, a former member of the U.S. State Department’s “China House” now at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote for War on the Rocks.

“Reconciling this asymmetry is an important part of what the administration should address,” he said.

Even in seemingly cut-and-dry cases like the arrest and conviction of U.S. citizen Lu Jianwang—accused of running an undisclosed Chinese police station in Manhattan’s Chinatown—legal proceedings can take years.

But to protect the rights of every defendant, court documents and transcripts are made available to the public, and the decision ultimately rests with a jury of a dozen civilians. Lu also has the right to appeal.

Trump may be critical of every domestic intervention against his agenda, but there’s little he can do about America’s greatest unfixable weakness—a system built to preserve the postwar rules-based order in general and the “American way” in particular.

There is perhaps no other way to fight the authoritarian powers the U.S. doesn’t wish to become.