This report aims to address gaps and show how American leaders can navigate the vast, perilous, largely unmapped terrain of technological decoupling. First, it gives an overview of U.S. thinking and policy, describing how U.S. views on Chinese technology have evolved in recent years and explaining the many tools that Washington uses to curb U.S.-China technological interdependence. Second, it frames the major strategic choices facing U.S. leaders, summarizing three proposed strategies for technological decoupling and advocating a middle path that preserves and expands America's options. Third, it translates this strategy into implementable policies and processes--proposing specific objectives for U.S. federal agencies and identifying the technology areas where government controls are (or are not) warranted. The report also highlights many domestic investments and other self-improvement measures that must go hand in hand with restrictive action.
For much of recorded history, China was a leading science and technology power. But just as the West rose, China turned in on itself, and missed the Industrial Revolution. The result was the 'Hundred Years of Humiliation', and a long struggle for a modern, yet distinctly Chinese, civilisational identity. Today, technological innovation has returned to the core of national pride and ambition.Since the 1980s, reforms have transformed China into the world's second largest economy and a major global power. Cyber space and other advanced technologies have become a battleground for international dominance; but today's world relies on global supply chains and interstate collaboration--at least, for now. Growing tension between the USA and China could result in the two superpowers decoupling their technology--with significant consequences for humanity's future.The Great Decoupling shows that this technology contest, and how it plays out, will shape the geopolitics of the twenty-first century.
Various efforts by US lawmakers and the executive during the Trump administration to move toward technological decoupling with China betray a deep-rooted and pathological misunderstanding of how the global technology industry works. They also risk backfiring on five counts. First, it is too little too late. If the United States was serious about policing what it refers to as China’s “innovation mercantilism,” it should have taken steps in this direction almost 15 years ago when China first got serious about increasing “indigenous innovation.” Second, efforts to contain China by cutting off its companies’ access to western technologies and markets are bound to be counterproductive. Chinese firms are sure to gain access sooner or later to these technologies and thereby succeed in their global ambitions anyway. Third, a policy of uncompromising confrontation only strengthens hawkish elements in China and further undercuts China’s case to embrace deeper market opening and structural reforms. Fourth, technological decoupling undermines the US’s relative position and its technology companies’ ability to maintain pre-eminence across a range of advanced technologies. Fifth and finally, US efforts to contain China for the sole purpose of retaining unchallenged hegemony essentially cedes the moral high ground to the Chinese leadership and undermines the US’s position globally as the so-called “city upon a hill.” Instead, the new Biden administration should use the US’s still formidable market power and geopolitical influence to both gently coerce and actively incentivize China into shouldering more responsibilities with its newfound economic power. Indeed, the carnage that the Trump administration has wreaked on the US-China relationship and the many trade and investment restrictions imposed on Chinese firms and imports provide a great starting point for the Biden administration to negotiate with China. They should focus on a more balanced and reciprocal relationship of mutual market openness and competitive opportunities for each nation’s firms and their respective domestic markets.
This paper proposes channels through which technological decoupling can affect global growth, and embeds these different layers in a global dynamic macroeconomic model. Multiple scenarios are considered that differ along two dimensions: (i) the coalition of countries (hubs) that initiate the decoupling, and (ii) whether non-hub countries are also forced to decouple via ‘preferential attachment’ – i.e. by aligning themselves with the hub they trade most with. All global technology hubs lose across scenarios, and losses are largest under preferential attachment. Smaller countries with relations that straddle multiple hubs generally lose, whereas those whose trade is heavily concentrated with one hub may gain due to reduced competition under some scenarios. Technological fragmentation can lead to losses in the order of 5 percent of GDP for many economies.
The global implications of China's rise as a global actor In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests. Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies. To better address the implications of China's new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China's regional and global ambitions. The initiative draws not only on Brookings's deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution's security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts. Areas of focus include the evolution of China's domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China's influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China's impact on global governance and norms. Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China's rise for the United States and the rest of the world.
Explores technology transfer from both the American and Chinese perspectives, focusing on four American firms--Foxboro, Westinghouse, Cummins Engine, and Combustion Engineering--that have bridged the cultural, political, and economic gaps. Considers the stages of background and development, negotiations, start-up, and management of the ongoing process. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
What new directions in China’s digital economy mean for us all China is the largest homogenous digital market on Earth: unified by language, culture, and mobile payments. Not only a consumer market of unrivaled size, it’s also a vast and hyperactive innovation ecosystem for new technologies. And as China’s digital economy moves from a consumer-focused phase to an enterprise-oriented one, Chinese companies are rushing to capitalize on ways the newer wave of tech—the Internet of Things, AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and data analytics (iABCD)—can unlock value for their businesses from non-traditional angles. In China’s Data Economy, Winston Ma—investment professional, capital markets attorney, adjunct professor of digital economy, and bestselling author—details the profound global implications of this new direction, including how Chinese apps for services such as food delivery expand so quickly they surpass their U.S. models within a couple of years, and how the sheer scale and pace of Chinese innovation might lead to an AI arms race in which China and the U.S. vie aggressively for leadership. How China’s younger netizens participate in their evolving digital economy as consumers, creators, and entrepreneurs Why Online/Office (OMO, Online-merge-with-Offline) integration is viewed as the natural next step on from the O2O (Online-to-Offline) model used in the rest of the world The ways in which traditional Chinese industries such as retail, banking, and insurance are innovating to stay in the game What emerging markets can learn from China as they leapfrog past the personal computer age altogether, diving straight into the mobile-first economy Anyone interested in what’s next for Chinese digital powerhouses—investors, governments, entrepreneurs, international business players—will find this an essential guide to what lies ahead as China’s flexes new digital muscles to create new forms of value and challenge established tech giants across the world.
We develop measures for technology decoupling and dependence between the U.S. and China based on combined patent data. The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China's dependence on the U.S. increased (decreased) during the first (second) decade. Firms covered by China's Strategic Emerging Industries policies became less decoupled with the U.S., gained cash flows and valuation but saw no improvement in either innovation output/quality or productivity. Post U.S. sanctions, firms in sanctioned sectors and their downstream suffer in performance but also became less decoupled with the U.S. However, firms in the upstream of the sanctioned sectors experienced significant improvements in productivity and produced more innovation of breaking-through and explorative quality.
The sharp confrontation between the US and China in high-tech industries continues. Securing and protecting the competitiveness of advanced technologies such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI) are emerging as key issues in external economic security, and the US government continues to check technologies in China through various means. In addition, the US has recently strengthened direct technical sanctions on China, and these have taken the form of export controls and investment restrictions, and has sought to check China through technological cooperation with US allies, as well. These sanctions against China and tech alliances with allies are likely to lead to an anti-globalization “blocification” that severs and separates high-tech supply chains, technologies, market ecosystems, and standards into two separate, opposed camps.Korea, which is highly dependent on the external economy in the high-tech sector, needs to be able to respond to a situation in which supply chains, technologies, standards, markets, and ecosystems of the US and China reside in separate blocs for a considerable period of time to come. This study analyzes the emerging supply chain blocs of both the US and China, in terms of technologies and ecosystems, focusing on the semiconductor and AI. It identifies the implications for industry carried by the analysis, and describes prospects for future developments.
The relation between China and the United States is arguably the most important bilateral relation in the world today. The U.S. and China are respectively the largest and the second largest economies in the world. They are also respectively the largest and the second largest trading nations in the world as well as each other’s most important trading partner. If China and the U.S. work together as partners towards a common goal, many things are possible. However, there exist significant friction and potential conflict in their economic relations. The large and persistent U.S.-China bilateral trade deficit is one of the problems. It is essential to know the true state of the China-U.S. trade balance before effective solutions can be devised to narrow the trade surplus or deficit. The impacts and potential impacts of the 2018 trade war between China and the U.S. on the two economies are analysed and discussed. The longterm forces that underlie the economic relations between the two countries beyond the 2018 trade war are examined. In this connection, how a “new type of major-power relation” between the two countries can help to keep the competition friendly and avert a war between them is explored. ~~~~~~~~ Lawrence J. Lau’s timely The China-U.S. Trade War and Future Economic Relations is full of careful analysis, penetrating insight and helpful suggestions from the world’s preeminent economist on this relationship. —Michael J. Boskin Tully M. Friedman Professor of Economics, Stanford University Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This sober and systematic study of U.S.-China trade relations and of technological development in the two countries is particularly timely. Lawrence Lau is one of the world’s foremost economists working on these issues. —Dwight H. Perkins Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, Emeritus Former Chair, Department of Economics, Harvard University This is a timely and penetrating analysis of the China-U.S. trade and economic relations, from its origins to its impacts and to a way forward. —Yingyi Qian Chairman of the Council, Westlake University Former Dean, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University Counsellor of the State Council, People’s Republic of China Lawrence Lau’s book on the current U.S.-China trade war is insightful, balanced and comprehensive; rich in data on trade, investment, science and technology. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to get past the headlines. —A. Michael Spence Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (2001) Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University Lawrence Lau brings light in the form of rigorous honest fact-based economic analysis to a subject where most of the discussion has been heated bluster, false claims, and political rhetoric. —Lawrence H. Summers Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury; Former President, Harvard University There is no topic more important, or more timely, or more urgent, than the China-U.S. trade war. Professor Lau is the ideal person to write about the implications of the China-U.S. trade war and the proposed resolution. —Tung Chee-Hwa Vice-Chairman, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee Chairman, China-U.S. Exchange Foundation The history of Sino-American relations, to a great extent, has been a shared history. Lawrence Lau’s timely and penetrating study will tell us it is still in best interest for both countries if they continue to pursue a shared journey and destination instead of parting ways. —Xu Guoqi Kerry Group Professor in Globalization History, The University of Hong Kong Author of Chinese and Americans: A Shared History This beautifully composed book uses nontechnical language to unravel the intricacies of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war, together with its long-term impact. I learned a lot from reading it. —Chen-Ning Yang Nobel Laureate in Physics (1957)
