The blueprint for corporate America’s global influence in many industries has been straightforward: build scale in the the world’s biggest domestic market, then ride a favourable geopolitical tide to go global.

The country’s tech companies have benefited from this playbook as much as any. But they face a discomforting realisation: China is well on the way to beating the US at its own game.

This week’s news that Google is trying to get back into China with a censored search service is a stark demonstration of how much is at stake. When it quit the country in 2010 rather than continue to censor its own results, it was buoyed by more than its own self-righteousness: there was a belief in Silicon Valley that China’s political restrictions would thaw as its economy developed, and that the US brand of internet capitalism would inevitably take hold.