By JOSÉ LUÍS FIORI*
China is now the world leader in 37 of the 44 technologies considered most important for future economic and military development
Capitalist competition is the most elementary force that drives the process of technological innovations, and these innovations are the key to the success of large corporations in their permanent dispute for “monopoly positions” and “extraordinary profits” in a market economy. “Cutting-edge” technological research and truly disruptive revolutionary technological innovations have always had the support of nation states, and have been guided by their respective defense and war preparedness strategies.[I]
These innovations and technologies are not born from simple market competition, which is why they are invariably concentrated in countries that occupy the most powerful positions within the international system, the so-called “great powers”. Countries that occupy lower positions in the hierarchy of international power, in turn, tend to access new technologies through copying, importing or small incremental adaptations, obtained by paying “intellectual property rights”. And this is exactly why all countries that propose, at some point, to change their position within the international hierarchy of power, face resistance and blockages, being forced to reorganize their national research and innovation systems.
This was also what happened to China, which was forced to quickly leave behind its “technological copying” strategy of the 70s and 80s, and set up a new system of technological innovation focused on “dual technologies”, ultimately based on instance, by the needs of its defense system. Especially after 1996, when the Chinese were forced to suspend their military maneuvers in “protest” by two North American aircraft carriers sent to the Taiwan Strait, after the new president of the Island, Lee Teng, recently elected and sworn in , expressed his desire to move forward with his project of Taiwan's independence from Mainland China.
From that moment on, China progressively changed its defense and technological innovation strategy, adopting a model similar to the North American model of research and development of “dual” technologies guided – in most cases – by the country's strategic needs and used at the same time. time for its civil economy. In the case of the “North American model”, the collage of innovation and defense systems took place definitively during World War II, with the creation of the National Defense Research Council (NDRC), largely responsible for the Manhattan project and the reorganization of scientific research in universities and private companies brought together in the same “military-industrial-academic complex” structured based on geopolitical and strategic competition with the Soviet Union.
In this sense, it can be said that the Cold War was the driving force behind the main North American technological advances in the second half of the 50th century, in the field of aerospace and nuclear energy, in the computing, fiber optics and transistors sectors, as well as chemistry, genetics and biotechnology. In all of these cases, United States military strategy served as the compass and prime mover behind the new “dual” technologies that revolutionized the world economy from the 3s onwards. Today, the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” ( DARPA) – which reports to the US Department of Defense – has a budget of more than XNUMX billion dollars and finances investigations in any and all sectors considered strategic for American security, regardless of their specific objective, simply by proposing to obtain “ radical innovations” always located at the frontier of human knowledge.
In the case of China, as we have seen, the new model was installed from the 90s onwards, but it radically accentuated and deepened in the first two decades of the XNUMXst century, when the Chinese became aware of the need to modernize their defense system in order to ensure their sovereignty and compete within your new habitat, the “capitalist interstate system” invented by Europeans. The initial step was taken with the creation of the “Commission of Science, Technology and Industry, for National Defense”, but the real leap took place in 1990, when the “863 Program” was created to finance “cutting-edge” research and, in particular, in 2001, when the “998 State Security Project” was launched, with the explicit objective of developing Chinese capacity to contain US forces in the South China Sea.
Between 1991 and 2001, Chinese military spending grew by 5% per year, and between 2001 and 2010, by 13%. Today, China has the second largest military budget in the world, but what matters, in this case, is that spending on “defense” already accounts for around 30% of all government spending on research and innovation, and was largely responsible by the advancement of the Chinese in the last three decades in all sectors of the economy strategically linked to their defense system. Further ahead, the “Medium and Long Term National Scientific and Technological Development Plan”, for the period between 2006 and 2020, increased the emphasis on “dual” technologies, with the central objective of achieving economic autonomy and military sovereignty from China. And although the Chinese continue to use global production and commercial chains, the truth is that they have made notable advances in the last three decades.
During the Barack Obama government (2009-2017), more precisely in 2012, the North American Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, presented the new United States Strategy focused on Asia (“Pivot to East Asia”). After this, the Donald Trump administration (2017-2021) declared a true “economic war” against China (through financial sanctions and trade blockades), which continued during the Biden administration. Simultaneously, Joe Biden intensified the military siege of China, through his initiative “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” – QUAD (with Japan, India and Australia), and its “strategic security pact” – AUKUS between the United States itself, England and Australia. An economic and military siege that added to the economic impact of Covid-19, raising the two powers to the umpteenth technological power, now focusing on the American and European attempt to block Chinese access to information and communication technologies essential for production of semiconductors used in the development of digital infrastructure for China's civil and military industries.
Many economic analysts consider it almost impossible that China can catch up and surpass the United States, or even that it can only achieve autonomy in this field that is essential for the continued development of its defense and space exploration system. What history tells us, however, is that after 30 years of concentrated effort, China is now the world leader in 37 of the 44 technologies considered most important for the economic and military development of the future, in the defense and aerospace sectors. , robotics, microelectronics, telecommunications, nuclear energy, environment, chemistry, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials and quantum technology.[ii] Therefore, it is not unlikely that sooner rather than later China will overcome this fundamental barrier to its autonomous economic and military development. It is known, however, that the North Americans and their allies consider this possibility as a real “red line” in their dispute with the Chinese for global power.
* Jose Luis Fiori He is professor emeritus at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of Global power and the new geopolitics of nations (Boitempo)[https://amzn.to/3RgUPN3]
Originally published on no. 6 of the XNUMXst Century International Observatory Bulletin – NUBEA/UFRJ.
Notes
[I] "As happened with other great powers, China seems to be following a technological road where the search for modern defense systems constitutes a primum mobile for national scientific endeavors and modern technologies”. N. Trebat and CA Medeiros, “Military modernization in Chinese Technical Progress and Industrial Innovation”, 2013, p. 25.
[ii] “In the long term, China's leading position in research means that it has established itself not only in current technological developments, but also in future technologies that do not yet exist”, Report from the Australian Strategic Policy Inatitute- ASPI, https://valor.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2023/03/02
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