An attempted coup in Moscow in the closing days of the Cold War in August 1991. Credit: Almog via Wikimedia. Commons.
We live in a new era. The post-Cold War period “is definitely over,” says President Joe Biden’s latest national security strategy, and the world’s major powers are competing to “shape what comes next.” The thing is, though, that the latest geopolitical installment seems to have borrowed plot points from an earlier one: the Cold War itself. Nuclear saber rattling? Check. Communists? Check. Proxy war? Check.
And more and more, a different dynamic is playing out with echoes of the Cold War. The unfolding sequel even includes an all-out battle for technological supremacy, where officials in both the United States and China fight to underline the modern technical development of the other country. The competition, the thinking, will influence how a country markets new technologies, creates new military capabilities, and defines the regulatory and ethical standards for emerging fields such as artificial intelligence (AI).
It’s a “tech war,” or so the media says. “Biden is now all-in to take out China,” Foreign Policy proclaimed. “The US goes on the offensive in its China tech war,” Bloomberg wrote. There are many other examples.
The “war” framing emphasizes how governments view technology research and development (R&D) as a key national security issue. In an area where, by some measures, the United States has lost ground, the Biden administration is now taking an aggressive stance, investing tens of billions in today’s high-tech industries while working to thwart China’s technological rise . War, however, is a troubling objective to view the US-China rivalry. It risks militarizing economic, scientific and technological competition – reinforcing the justifications for “expanding military budgets and brinksmanship”, as one analyst puts it. “War” rhetoric risks promoting nationalism, discrimination and oppression. Given the transformative nature of some emerging technologies, such as AI or biotechnology, but also the clashing trajectories of the United States and China, there are arguments for the sense of urgency that a metaphorical war can provide.
losing ground. By many metrics, the US appears to be slipping in R&D. take financing. In the years after World War II, the US government funded about 65 percent of research and development in the United States; today this figure is 24 percent, according to a new book by Daniel Gerstein, a RAND Corporation researcher and former science and technology official at the Department of Homeland Security, called Tech Wars: Transforming US Technology Development.
Not only has US government investment in R&D fallen, Gerstein’s book says, but other countries have risen in the ranks of R&D funders. In 1960, the United States had a 70 percent share of global research and development. By 2018, the US share stood at 26 percent, while China accounted for 21 percent.
Gerstein, a contributor to the Bulletin, believes the US government needs to pay much more attention to R&D. The risks, he wrote in his book, “of not getting it right, continue to grow for the United States and humanity.” There are two massive initiatives underpinning China’s R&D ambitions, argues Gerstein: the Belt and Road Initiative and Made in China 2025. The first is an effort to build infrastructure such as railways, ports and power plants in countries around the world, with Chinese-made supplies and Chinese contractors (and paid to use loans from China). Policymakers in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere, however, have long viewed the plan to bring dozens of countries into a Chinese economic sphere with suspicion.
Made in China 2025, meanwhile, is an effort by the Chinese government to dominate the country’s various technology sectors, including AI, semiconductors and biotechnology. In some areas such as communication infrastructure, China has already taken the lead in becoming a powerhouse in the realm of telecom equipment, which forms the framework for the next generation of mobile phones.
“We always have competitions; Competitions are part of the human experience. This feels a little different,” Gerstein said. “The Chinese, for example, have laid down the gauntlet and talked about the Belt and Road Initiative, which could encompass two-thirds of the world’s population if they achieve what they did have got. And also, [with] Made in China 2025, they are really determined that they have selected a number of different technologies that they want to lead in many of which [the United States] is currently the global leader.
In recent months, the Biden administration appears to have become more aggressive in its efforts to maintain the US lead in R&D.
Days before declaring the end of the post-Cold War era earlier this month, the administration unveiled what analysts say are weak rules aimed at suffocating China’s semiconductor industry — the sector that makes the computer chips that make the latest advances in enable artificial intelligence (AI) and supercomputing.
Saying that semiconductor development could help the Chinese military, the administration issued rules to prevent the export to China of advanced chips, the equipment to make them, and even foreign chips that used US technology during the production process . The restrictions also cut off US citizens, residents and green card holders from participating in the Chinese semiconductor industry, forcing the Chinese government to “reinvent the wheel” in this very important technical field.
A recently passed bill would invest $52 billion in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research and development — “one of the largest industrial development programs the federal government has ever administered.” The measure also attracted interest from the private sector for semiconductors. Gerstein sees the Biden administration making other such signals through an initiative to invest in biotechnology, including earmarking $2 billion for “bioeconomic research, development, and infrastructure.”
More than an economic rivalry? For years, U.S. officials have worried about Chinese government espionage — and about how U.S. companies are helping China’s ambitions, if at all.
As Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei pursued deals to build 5G telecommunications networks in Britain and elsewhere, all while trying to become a dominant mobile phone company, US presidential administrations responded by blocking the company from the US network, preventing US companies such as Google out of business with Huawei, pressuring allies to keep Huawei out of their network infrastructure. US officials have argued that Huawei, founded by former Chinese army technologist Ren Zhengfei, was an espionage risk, claiming its equipment had surveillance backdoors. (The U.S. government may know a thing or two about this alleged ruse, considering that the CIA reportedly secretly operated Crypto AG, a communications encryption company that “weakened” products in Pakistan, India, and a number of other countries for decades sold.)
More recently, a Washington Post investigation revealed how Chinese military research groups working on hypersonic missile programs are creating US-made software vital to hypersonic missile development despite an export “blacklist”.
Chinese leaders want China to “become the world’s leading power,” the Biden administration said in its 2022 national security strategy. The country “uses its technological capacity and increasing influence on international institutions to create more permissive conditions for its own authoritarian model,” said the document, which calls China “America’s consequential geopolitical challenge.”
Just as the confrontational tenor of the “post-Cold War era” carries risks—such as the possibility of actual war between warring rivals—so does technological competition, in ways similar to those in the old Cold War days. “The dilemmas of engaging with a strategic competitor on science issues—from concerns about dual-use technologies and research to industrial espionage, academic exchanges, and visas—are continuations of debates that went dormant in 1989,” Brendan said. Thomas-Noone wrote. a piece for Brookings
During the decades of the Cold War, the scientific and technological ties linking the Soviet Union and the United States waxed and waned. In 1959, for example, a partnership between the US National Academy of Science and the Academy for Science of the Soviet Union led to joint work on energy and aspects of arms control. A decade later, US policy “actively encouraged dual-use technological trade with the Soviet bloc,” according to Thomas-Noone. But in the 1980s the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. The Soviets caught up, Washington officials feared, by exploiting the student exchanges, scientific conferences and unclassified reports of the previous period of openness. Through this, the Soviets “saved a considerable amount of time and money by showing the fruitful avenues of research and development,” said a 1981 Pentagon report. US export policies were tightened to the point where officials not only examined physical technologies, but know-how and relationships between researchers.
More recently, the same kind of Cold War-era suspicions have guided US policy toward China. In the Trump administration, the Justice Department’s National Security Division initiated an investigation into economic espionage, called the China Initiative, which seeks to investigate academics’ ties to China. Human rights groups have called the initiative racial profiling, and the charges brought in the investigations have often involved grant fraud, researchers have not disclosed funding from a Chinese institution. The Ministry of Justice eventually closed the initiative, acknowledging the problematic racial dimensions of the investigation and pledging that “we will be relentless in defending our country from China.”
During the Cold War, geopolitical tensions also hampered scientific partnerships.
Thomas-Noone notes how academics, including the presidents of MIT, Stanford, and several other major universities, have pushed back against government restrictions intended to keep certain computer chip technology classified. The restrictions, the presidents wrote, prevented necessary scholarly communication about various technologies to the point where “faculty could not conduct classroom lectures when foreign students were present.” The government’s policy, meant to prevent the diffusion of militarily applicable technologies, could also lead to a “chilling effect” on researchers whose work had a “much broader utility in such other areas as medical systems and communication equipment.”
American suspicions of China concern the country’s military goals – such as the development of hypersonic missiles – as well as its authoritarian incorporation of technology to preserve the power of the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese government is building a turbo-charged, tech-enabled surveillance system so comprehensive that for Uyghur minorities in Xinjiang, for example, growing a beard or using a back door instead of the front entrance will trigger police suspicion. China comes in at the bottom of the nonprofit Freedom House ranking of internet freedom. An army of censors scans a closed web – the Great Firewall – for every stroke of discontent, quickly blocking and removing content. “I just wonder what it would look like if a not so open nation had led the development of the Internet, and then the standards and regulations and policies that govern the Internet,” Gerstein said.
And the Chinese government exports authoritarian-enabling technology around the world. A 2019 piece in the New York Times reported that 18 countries were using Chinese-made “intelligence surveillance” systems and were getting even more training in “public opinion management,” a.k.a. censorship. In Russia, where criticism of the war in Ukraine can lead to jail time, officials are working to engineer more Chinese-style government controls into an already restricted web.
But as Yangyang Cheng, a writer, physicist and fellow at Yale Law School, wrote in a piece for Wired, the national-security-driven focus on China stealing information or misusing technology, the kind that led to China’s Initiative led, for example, can ask ethical questions obscure people should be in America. Before US-China relations sank to their current lows, American institutions and scientists were “eager to partner with China,” regardless of the murky ways in which officials there used scientific and technological advances. A US geneticist eventually contributed to a police system to genetically track the Uyghurs. And of course, the police used controversial technologies such as facial recognition in the United States. “Instead of reckoning with global systems of injustice and one’s complicity in them, it is politically expedient and self-liberating to fixate on alleged threats from a foreign other,” Cheng wrote.
Indeed, there are many skeptics who question the framing of global tech competition as “war”.
In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin told schoolchildren that whoever excelled in AI would be the “ruler of the world,” while touting Russia’s technological advances. A few years later, however, his huge and supposedly advanced military would be hidden, if not in retreat, in the nearby Ukraine. The ominous-seeming Belt and Road Initiative may not be going as planned either. Countries can’t repay loans, and Chinese officials are looking for ways to come back.
So is the media rhetoric about tech war just hyperbole? Robert Daly, who analyzes US-China relations and is the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, came to the Cold War framework after initially rejecting it as simplistic and dangerous. “The world’s two most powerful nations have, funny or otherwise, embarked on a comprehensive competition, including a competition to shape the global order,” he wrote in the bulletin. “Their rivalry includes a growing arms race and the expansion of nuclear capability. … We are one crisis away from cementing rivalry as the basis of bilateral relations for decades to come.
There are no “bright spots” in the relationship, Daly wrote, and the two sides do not seem to be working together on climate change, pandemic prevention and other transnational issues: “If this is not a Cold War, the term has no meaning.”
Even Gerstein, the author, struggled with whether to call the global technological race a war, a conflict or a competition. “The intended use of the term war is to signify the magnitude and urgency of what we must do,” he said. “Just to treat it like any kind of normal competition seems like it underestimates the importance of doing well in this and ultimately prevailing.”
Debates about whether or not we are in a tech war or even a new Cold War may just be semantics. Either way, we are in a dangerous place.
