Derek M. Scissors
Despite headlines about a US-China technology race, America isn’t competing—corporate profits and weak policy undermine long-term strategy.
The US-China technology competition receives a great deal of attention. It’s certainly an important issue, on paper. One problem: America is not genuinely competing now, and never has. Moreover, the second Trump administration has moved the United States further away from genuine competition, apparently for the sake of short-term financial gains at home.
The Chinese Side
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is competing. The first goal of the Communist Party is, of course, to preserve its own rule. A serious risk to that rule is foreign, particularly American, coercion. There are a variety of ways the PRC might be coerced, but foreign technological capability is usually at the heart of the threat. A blockade of the commodities imports that the economy requires, for instance, is far more feasible if foreign militaries are technologically superior. The extraordinary income Chinese firms earn overseas does not rely on technological superiority, but it is vulnerable to foreign breakthroughs. Possibly most worrisome to General Secretary Xi Jinping is foreign technology that can expose internal Party records and communication or undermine authority in a crisis.
That the PRC has been attempting to climb the technological ladder is old news. Its capacity to compete in advanced technology with the United States (and others) has emerged more recently. The basic Chinese model remains the same: the state belatedly identifies important technology, usually prompted by the private sector, then commands development of that technology while providing various kinds of support. The identification stage has become more difficult as the PRC gets closer to the technology frontier, but the resources available for state support have expanded tremendously. It’s worth noting that the Party is unlikely to voluntarily permit deployment of technology at the frontier, due to potential threats to its authority. China is competing for political stability and commercial advantage, not to induce risk.
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