When the Technology transfer with China team was presenting, a single question kept coming to mind: what would motivate China to share with us when they can just have hackers steal it? While at CSIS, this point was made particularly strongly by Jim Lewis when emphasizing the dire threat that intellectual property theft by the Chinese poses today. In doing some more thinking and researching about this, I think this could actually be a significant downfall for China in the long-term but must be addressed more aggressively on a short-term basis.
One interesting article I found while doing some searching noted the ‘obsession’ currently occurring in China over winning a Nobel Prize in the sciences. I think that if you couple this with their thieving cyber attacks, it reveals that China is focused on the wrong goal. Instead of fostering innovation and creativity, they rely on stealing the U.S. and other country’s novel ideas and technologies. The article also makes an interesting point that if China is so secure in its path to reclaiming their role as world superpower, why do they need an award to show this? Personally, I think they are completely right. China seems all too narrowly focused on proving they have regained their position as a superpower rather than ensuring that they actually are one.
In my opinion, this reveals a significant blemish on China’s path of regaining the top spot at the podium. They without a doubt have the economic might to support their spot as the alpha dog among world leaders, sitting on billions of dollars of trade surplus. However, I think this is only half the battle. The hackings and Nobel obsession reveal their weakness in that they lack the ingenuity and innovation necessary to protect and maintain this top spot. This is why I don’t think a technology transfer policy would be particularly successful.
To me, China seems simply too voracious in its pursuit of power on the international scene for the transfer program to function on a basis of equality. If we were to enact such a policy, present events and tendencies reveal that it would most likely be supplemented with illegal and undermining activities. As a result of China’s past actions in addressing this void in scientific innovation, I think our policy approach should be one of aggression not solidarity. But even before we can begin to entertain a technology transfer relationship with them, the issue of intellectual property theft must be addressed.To illustrate this point, I have a fairly short personal story. At a past internship, the company I worked for had three main research facilities: one in the U.S., where I interned, one in France, and one in China. We had a fairly sophisticated and very expensive piece of testing equipment that was integral to the majority of the research our labs conducted. The summer before I interned, the Chinese lab took this particular piece of equipment apart until it was separated into each individual component. As I heard from one employee, no one really knew what they were doing but let it go on and eventually the equipment company was brought in to put the device back together. The summer I worked there, one task I was charged with was comparing data from our original piece of equipment to a brand new device created in the Chinese lab which performed the very same task and looked almost identical. No one in the office thought this was a coincidence. The issue of intellectual property theft seems to be too severe of an issue to settle with amiable collaboration. They are stealing our ideas and we must take more aggressive action.
Jennica: I completely agree that Intellectual Property Rights violations present one of the biggest challenges to creating a mutually-beneficial technology cooperation between the U.S. and China. The problem is that there is currently no effective system for dealing with international IPR violations. Although the U.S. has created a pretty operable method of enforcing domestic IPR violations by law (watch out if you download movies and music!,) the Chinese do not have the same concept of IPR and consequently do not enforce it within their own country or when violations occur on strategic IP belonging to companies/governments in other countries—especially when these violations promote Chinese national interests.
ReplyDeleteSince the current system is broken, and China is benefiting from the current system, it is unlikely that China would be interested in sacrificing its present gains in order to create a new framework that would benefit its competitor the U.S. too—unless there were potentially intimidating sticks or yummy carrots involved. In trying to decide what policy approach would be most practical to engage China, we decided against demonstrating American economic and diplomatic force as our primary strategy because how would it sounds if we told China “You must engage in this energy technology cooperation or we will align with countries aggrieved by your IPR violations, leverage the WTO to enact sanctions against you, and close our markets to your goods.” Only a hegemonic power looking to display its brute force would begin by coercing a country into cooperating, which could also possibly incite a trade dispute or greater conflict.
China is already allocating more of its national budget towards researching and developing clean energy technology than the U.S. is, which demonstrates China’s sincere attempt at transforming how it consumes energy. By showing China that working with the U.S. to develop technologies will be more beneficial than working alone, because together we will achieve the same results using half our budgets and also create new jobs for American experts in China as well as Chinese manufacturers, we will present a scenario in which everyone wins, particularly because it would reduce strains on Sino-American relations.