The absolute failure of the U.S. political elites to understand what is happening in the global arena of science and technology, has been made readily apparent in two recent measures, one implemented by the Trump Administration and the other hotly debated in the U.S. Congress.
The first is the ban issued by the new board of the National Science Foundation, barring U.S. colleges and universities from collaborating with many Chinese scientists and other entities on the Federal government’s restricted parties list. The Trump Administration only succeeded in getting the ban implemented by firing the entire board and replacing them with Trump stalwarts. The new list of prohibited entities includes some of the most prestigious institutions in China, which are making major breakthroughs in some of the frontier areas of science, including nuclear fusion, quantum communications, and artificial intelligence. Included are Chinese research universities, such as Nanjing University, Beijing Institute of Technology, and the University of Science and Technology of China.
This continues a policy initiated in the first Trump administration, which adopted the mistaken assumption that the U.S. was still number one in most areas of science and technology and that restricting cooperation with China would maintain that lead. That was false then, and is doubly so now.
Secondly, a roundtable was organized on Capitol Hill by the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs which Chairman Eric Burlison (R-MO) titled “Winning the Economic Competition with China: Working Families, the AI Race, and Energy. Recommendations from this event included imposing more dramatic sanctions on China, including removal of China from semiconductor supply chains, in order to slow Chinese momentum and accelerate U.S. technological advances.
“China is a systemic rival. It seeks to challenge and displace the United States as the guarantor for the American-led post-war order, and it does it on multiple fronts,” said Piero Tozzi, senior China director with the America First Policy Institute. Tozzi was also upset at China’s ability to become the technological “pace-setter” and to even change the notion of human rights by declaring people’s rise out of poverty a human right.
The irony of the entire argument is that cutting the U.S. science community off from real producers of frontier breakthroughs, such as China, can only lead to further impoverishment of U.S. capabilities. The only result will be that China will reply in kind, jettisoning cooperation with the U.S., restricting access to its scientific papers, and turning to the rest of the world for cooperation. The hostile attitude manifested by the hysterics in Congress and in the Administration will only lead to a doubling down by China on their own scientific efforts. And, unlike the United States, they have developed a scientific structure in which they can implement such a policy faster and more effectively than the United States. In addition, the restrictive policy of the Trump Administration has also significantly diminished the attraction of the United States as a venue for foreign scholars, particularly Chinese scholars, who have been a mainstay of U.S. technological development over the last half-century.
