By Tom Fowdy
As reported in the Washington Post today, the Trump administration is advancing a rule which if implemented, will ban all U.S Federal funding for scientific research and collaboration with China. The article details that the American scientific community is scathingly opposed to such a rule, stating that the logic behind it is premised on an anachronistic "Cold War" worldview that misplaces American superiority in its own capabilities.
As Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association for American Universities, which advocates on behalf of leading U.S. research universities, told the Post: "I do think there are still members of Congress who think we have a monopoly on knowledge. They think we're still in the Cold War Soviet era ... where we were ahead in most areas of science and technology. That is not the case with China. We are no longer the leader in many areas of science."
Likewise, researchers have blasted the false assumption that by collaborating with China on scientific research, they are "helping" China, when the reality is in fact the other way round. As Steven Kivelson, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University who has NSF and Education Department grants, also quoted, "When I go to China, it's to learn about the latest developments in the field, not to offer them the fruits of U.S. research."
When it comes to China, science and technology, American political culture is gripped by a paranoia which is both ideologically and historically motivated. The United States has always, so to speak, had a normative institutional behaviour that espouses massive hysteria and deeply exaggerated premises regarding targeted adversaries in order to justify heavy-handed foreign policies and domestic clampdowns. From McCarthyism itself, to Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass destruction, to North Korea about to nuke the country, we should understand American politics through the lens of dramatisation that seeks to affirm the worst-case scenario in every instance.
Yet for China, that is only part of the picture. The US has convinced itself, misleadingly, that China "cannot innovate" and that the entire premise of Beijing's economic and technological rise is attributable to excessive American goodwill and "intellectual property theft." As it goes, successive Presidential administrations have reasoned that if China is subject to a harsh process of technological and scientific containment, it will surely stagnate just like the Soviet Union did because Beijing cannot match the American entrepreneurial and competitive spirit.
Of course, it is true that for most of modern history the United States has been the world's most fiercely competitive and innovative country. However, with such hubris comes an ideological misinterpretation of what China is. While China is in practice a hierarchical, centralised Communist state, that does not mean it is not a "competitive" country or society. In fact, China, like most East Asian countries, constitutes one of the most harshly competitive societies in the world in terms of both commerce and educational attainment, precisely because social reputation and namesake prestige are what people value. As a result, Chinese people study and learn to an extreme.
As a result, China, as a country of 1.4 billion people, has advanced to become increasingly scientifically and technologically powerful not because "they're stealing American technology" but because its social and commercial structure incentivises learning and competitiveness. Thus, while it is assumed in the Western ideological view that less individual expression, through politics, hampers innovation and creativity, in reality the conformist societies of East Asia actually force greater competitiveness because everyone pushes to copy the commercially most popular idea, therefore, you have to stay ahead of the pack to succeed.
China is a socialist country, yet the form of capitalism that exists in practice is astonishingly brutal, and as a result it has grown rapidly to become a scientific giant which produces more research papers and more citations than the United States does, and thus, through the sheer scale of the country, ultimately has more resources, personnel, and innovations. However, American politicians have reduced China to the caricature of a feckless, parasitical country that has no incentives of its own other than to get rich from stealing US technology, believing it will just shrivel up and perish with it.
Thus, in reality, American hostility is pushing away brilliant Chinese minds from its own shores precisely because they are subjected to McCarthyist witch hunts. Ironically, this means such policies are actually harming the United States at China's benefit, forgetting that it has been the extraordinary openness and opportunity of America that ultimately made it great to begin with.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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