I sincerely doubt that Xi Jinping is quaking in his boots about the U.S. government’s attempts to reinvigorate America’s technology prowess. The reason? His party-state has proven that it can steal or buy ideas from America’s labs and start-ups and develop and commercialize them faster than the Americans can. In other words, if the new legislation, which President Biden says he will sign into law, produces new and better technologies, the Chinese have proven that they can “harvest” them.
There are several attack vectors, as I explained in The New Art of War and will explain again in A Grand Strategy: Countering China, Taming Technology, and Restoring the Media, which should go live any day now:
–There are some 350,000 to 360,000 Chinese students at American universities and they concentrate on scientific and technical fields. They are in the heart of America’s R&D engine. Yet some of them were officers of the People’s Liberation Army in disguise and those folks have gone home. But there almost certainly are others working for China’s centralized technology acquisition efforts, such as its Thousand Talents program. I don’t see many signs that university presidents are taking this challenge very seriously. Reason? They want the tuition money.
–The Chinese have deeply penetrated America’s IT systems and essentially can hack anything they want to. That means no secret is really safe. The Russians are trying to disrupt our democracy and sow chaos in our infrastructure, but the Chinese are playing a smarter, longer-term game. They want our ideas. Until we get serious about hardening our IT systems, there is no amount of money the U.S. government can spend to boost America’s technological standing in the world–the best pieces will walk out the back door to China.
–Lastly, it’s not clear that the Administration will be able to draw in America’s tech giants into the new tech campaign–and that if it does draw them in, they won’t share some of the best insights with Chinese customers. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel and Amazon have yet to accept the premise that they are American companies, not stateless enterprises that shift technology to wherever it makes the most money. We need them to commit to support the development of American technologies and to understand the national security implications if they sell such technology to China.
