Chapter 18
Indigenous Innovation: Seeking to Command Advanced Technologies by All Means
China is rushing to access the world’s most advanced technologies and to become a leader in research and development. The China-West technology war has begun.
About 10 years ago, at a Russo-Japanese gathering of leading experts on international affairs, during a debate on China and its new global role, a prominent Russian scholar (expressing his personal point of view) bluntly told the Japanese side: “It was you who created this economic and political monster. Now we all have to pay the price.” He meant massive Japanese (and generally Western) investment in China and a large-scale official development aid as major prerequisites for its spurt and emergence as a superpower.
The formula is largely correct if you accept the wording. Let us put it this way: Western investment and development aid contributed a lot to the birth of a new superpower of a size and character never seen before, which is now posing unprecedented challenges for the West itself. As far as the economic dimension is concerned, until recently the formula applied to production and exports.
The West Is Creating China as a New Technological Superpower
Why did the West do it? Obviously, because with its gigantic pool of cheap and efficient labor and the world’s most dynamic market, China provided unique business opportunities. Due to this uniqueness, it faced no big problems with using Western capital, technologies, and expertise ...
