China has never had a real chip industry. Making AI chips could change that.

Donald Trump is speaking Mandarin. This is happening in the city of Tianjin, about an hour's drive south of Beijing, within a gleaming office building that belongs to iFlytek, one of China's rapidly rising artificial-intelligence companies. Beyond guarded gates, inside a glitzy showroom, the US president is on a large TV screen heaping praise on the Chinese company. It's Trump's voice and face, but the recording is, of course, fake--a cheeky demonstration of the cutting-edge AI technology iFlytek is developing. Jiang Tao chuckles and leads the way to some other examples of iFlytek's technology.