China–US rivalry in industrial technology standards: an evolutionary game analysis under trade imbalance

China–US rivalry has shifted from tariffs and merchandise to the rules governing industrial technology, where standards set the terms of compatibility and allocate network externalities. Existing accounts catalogue the two sides' strategies but hold them fixed, leaving co-evolution and equilibrium selection unexplained. We model the contest as an asymmetric evolutionary game between two boundedly rational national players: an incumbent choosing open accommodation or containment through exclusion, and a latecomer choosing followership in the prevailing regime or indigenous catch-up under an alternative standard. The state variables—the share of firms, policy factions, and standards bodies behind each course—follow replicator dynamics. Stability analysis, regime classification, and simulation trace how rule-setting rents, network externalities, containment and switching costs, and the initial mix determine the outcome. Two stable equilibria result—fragmentation and compatibility—with basins set jointly by payoffs and initial conditions, alongside regimes of openness with followership or indigenous catch-up; the thresholds are bifurcations of a two-dimensional system, not phase transitions. Basin maps and Monte Carlo sampling find conditional coexistence modal and the directions robust; a counterfactual decomposition shows isolated changes cannot escape the fragmentation basin, while their combination makes compatibility the unique attractor. The outcome is neither dictated by technical efficiency nor winner-take-all, but a conditional coexistence that remains open to reshaping.