Super interesting piece. But it did provoke a thought for me...the way I read it was that there were some undercurrents of a pro-US-capitalist style of innovation and buisness (which I don't disagree with), but I do wonder if it is always true. Basically I felt there was an implicit asymmetry in what counts as techno-nationalism.
When China blocks Google and Facebook, subsidizes domestic champions, or closes parts of its market to foreign technology, we correctly read that as evidence that China never accepted the liberal, open-market technological order. But I’m curious whether the U.S. response when Chinese technology actually becomes competitive deserves more scrutiny here too.
Huawei is on the FCC’s national-security Covered List. Congress created a divest-or-prohibition regime specifically encompassing TikTok/ByteDance. We put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. And Commerce’s semiconductor controls are explicitly designed to restrict China’s ability to develop advanced computing capacity.
That becomes particularly interesting because China isn’t always the technological follower anymore. You acknowledge that yourself with Huawei surpassing Western competitors in telecom infrastructure. China now produces roughly three-quarters of the world’s EVs and more than 80% of its battery cells.
None of that makes the U.S. and China politically equivalent—the differences in censorship, legal process, political rights, and the scope of state control are obviously enormous. But I think it complicates the liberal-America / techno-nationalist-China framing.
If the defining virtue of the American technology order is openness, what happens when openness produces a competitor that wins? At what point does defending a liberal technological order require increasingly protectionist or illiberal tools?
Thanks for reading and pointing out a story not told here: By integrating into the world economy, China's growth matured many industries. Some directly aided building out their national security state. Dual-use technologies, like semiconductors but even the algorithims you point out, put Washington into a catch-22: on one hand, do we raise walls of that trade to prevent more technological diffusion from other clusters of innovation? on the other hand, doesn't that just spur more "indigenization"?
I wrote about this debate in Washington at the time, four years ago, at CSIS which I'll link below. To summarize, there was still some debate about whether we should even restrict the trade of dual-use technologies to China. Now, restrictionist thinking dominates.
In the IC in 2022-3, I saw a lot of different views from various institutions, e.g. Treasury officials were naturally far more dovish than the National Security Council advisors running interagency policy meetings. Power is distributed, even among such a unitary executive today. So I don't believe that there's a coherent strategy to Washington over any given foreign policy; the policies you point out that have emerged over Huwaei, TikTok/ByteDance/EVs are stories of people— live players like Jack Lew, Robert Lighthizer, Howard Lutnick, Jared Kushner— that all hold enough leverage to "get things done".
To your last point: have we created a competitor that is beating us? I'm optimistic. I share Mehran Gul's thinking here. He travelled the world surveying different clusters of innovation in his recent book "The New Geography of Innovation" where the natural comparison of Silicon Valley and China (Shenzen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, etc) arose... America creates ladders, but China climbs them faster. I remain hopeful that we will continue to lead the frontier. We can further discuss the EVs and battery cells point if you'd like, but I'm getting long here.
CSIS Pieces - at the time, the word thrown around was "decoupling". I think it's moved to "de-risking" and "co-optition" competition + cooperation, but I'm not following it as closely anymore as I try to understand more about the technology itself.
Super interesting piece. But it did provoke a thought for me...the way I read it was that there were some undercurrents of a pro-US-capitalist style of innovation and buisness (which I don't disagree with), but I do wonder if it is always true. Basically I felt there was an implicit asymmetry in what counts as techno-nationalism.
When China blocks Google and Facebook, subsidizes domestic champions, or closes parts of its market to foreign technology, we correctly read that as evidence that China never accepted the liberal, open-market technological order. But I’m curious whether the U.S. response when Chinese technology actually becomes competitive deserves more scrutiny here too.
Huawei is on the FCC’s national-security Covered List. Congress created a divest-or-prohibition regime specifically encompassing TikTok/ByteDance. We put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. And Commerce’s semiconductor controls are explicitly designed to restrict China’s ability to develop advanced computing capacity.
That becomes particularly interesting because China isn’t always the technological follower anymore. You acknowledge that yourself with Huawei surpassing Western competitors in telecom infrastructure. China now produces roughly three-quarters of the world’s EVs and more than 80% of its battery cells.
None of that makes the U.S. and China politically equivalent—the differences in censorship, legal process, political rights, and the scope of state control are obviously enormous. But I think it complicates the liberal-America / techno-nationalist-China framing.
If the defining virtue of the American technology order is openness, what happens when openness produces a competitor that wins? At what point does defending a liberal technological order require increasingly protectionist or illiberal tools?
Thanks for reading and pointing out a story not told here: By integrating into the world economy, China's growth matured many industries. Some directly aided building out their national security state. Dual-use technologies, like semiconductors but even the algorithims you point out, put Washington into a catch-22: on one hand, do we raise walls of that trade to prevent more technological diffusion from other clusters of innovation? on the other hand, doesn't that just spur more "indigenization"?
I wrote about this debate in Washington at the time, four years ago, at CSIS which I'll link below. To summarize, there was still some debate about whether we should even restrict the trade of dual-use technologies to China. Now, restrictionist thinking dominates.
In the IC in 2022-3, I saw a lot of different views from various institutions, e.g. Treasury officials were naturally far more dovish than the National Security Council advisors running interagency policy meetings. Power is distributed, even among such a unitary executive today. So I don't believe that there's a coherent strategy to Washington over any given foreign policy; the policies you point out that have emerged over Huwaei, TikTok/ByteDance/EVs are stories of people— live players like Jack Lew, Robert Lighthizer, Howard Lutnick, Jared Kushner— that all hold enough leverage to "get things done".
To your last point: have we created a competitor that is beating us? I'm optimistic. I share Mehran Gul's thinking here. He travelled the world surveying different clusters of innovation in his recent book "The New Geography of Innovation" where the natural comparison of Silicon Valley and China (Shenzen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, etc) arose... America creates ladders, but China climbs them faster. I remain hopeful that we will continue to lead the frontier. We can further discuss the EVs and battery cells point if you'd like, but I'm getting long here.
CSIS Pieces - at the time, the word thrown around was "decoupling". I think it's moved to "de-risking" and "co-optition" competition + cooperation, but I'm not following it as closely anymore as I try to understand more about the technology itself.
The Debate to Decouple: https://www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/debate-decouple
The Drive to Decouple: https://www.csis.org/blogs/new-perspectives-asia/drive-decouple