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“We are in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” Biden said on April 28th. “We are at a great inflection point in history. We have to do more than just build back better. … We have to compete more strenuously.”

The question we are examining today is what does “compete more strenuously mean.” I’ll be identifying four distinct fields in which heightened competition is likely to come to the fore but first some context and disclaimers.

The first point to note is that, in President Biden’s own words, some partial answers are already clear. Biden has made clear that he sees this 21st century competition as one between the US and its democratic allies on the one side versus Xi, Putin and other autocratic leaders on the other side. in other words, the heart of the competition is democracy versus autocracy. What Biden has also made clear involves timing, that the competition will not be joined in earnest until the U.S. has emerged from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and largely revitalized the performance of the U.S. domestic economy.

Two caveats are also in order. The analysis provided below is strictly my own. The Biden administration – under Kurt Campbell, deputy assistant to the President and  coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the National Security Council — is currently directing an assessment under which cabinet-level departments and some agencies are re-viewing their policies and procedures as they relate to China. These departments and agencies will be reporting their findings to the White House later this year at which point Kurt Campell, his senior director for China Laura Rosenberger, and their staff will be synthesizing these inputs and articulating an updated “whole of government” policy towards China. (This process is consistent with the ‘get our house in order now’ before focusing on generational competition with China, as referenced above.) Clear answers to the question we’re examining today likely won’t be rolled out by the Administration until that process is complete.

In the meantime, the single best open-source for a quasi-authoritative readout of Biden’s thinking on what heightened US- China technology competition will look like may be the Penn Biden Center. While I am affiliated with Fox Leadership International under the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn, I want to make clear that this blog post does not draw on any information from that source.  This is my analysis and I bear sole responsibility for any deficiencies.

So, on to the substance …

At the broadest level, the U.S. needs to up its game in four areas of traditional strength to respond more effectively to the 21^st century tech challenge from China:

Field 1:   Industry Sector Focus

NASA’s manned mission to the moon and DARPA’s role in the creation of the internet are the most storied examples of U.S. Government success in mid-wiving new high technology industries.  What has changed since those early post-war successes is the subsequently accelerated pace of technology innovation and development in the Fourth Industrial Age.  In fields as diverse as semiconductor design and fabrication, 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence and robotics, quantum computing, EV batteries and biotechnology, U.S. government policy is currently nowhere near as focused in positioning its support role as is China.  What is called for is not a return to 20^th century “industrial policy” (and its poor record of picking company-level winners and losers) but a new, 21^st century approach to policy support to better prepare eco-system support for the emergence of entire new industries.    

Field 2:   Funding for Innovation & Regulation of Foreign Acquisitions

Despite the recent trend-line of falling investment in basic research in the U.S. and increasing levels of basic research investment in China, the fact remains that China is still no match for the U.S. in terms of the breadth, depth and quality of its basic research or of the commercial potential of the developments it spins off.  This is readily apparent in cutting-edge fields like advanced semiconductor design and gene therapy.  In these fields, China can’t put a home-grown team onto the field but instead tries to snap up foreign talent and fledgling foreign companies in hit-or-miss hopes of leveraging that into a domestic breakthrough.  Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) and other related government entities need more focus on the dynamics underpinning tomorrow’s industries and less on yesterday’s. Likewise, less silo-ing between basic research and commercial development is urgently needed.

Level 3:   Rule of Law

Perhaps no societal field offers greater contrast between the U.S. and China than the field of law and legal practice.  The U.S. system of case law based on precedent stretches back to the time of the Saxon Kings of England (with very occasional admixtures from the Roman system of law more common to Continental Europe).  As enshrined in the U.S. constitution, ours is the rule of law, not the rule of men (or women).  While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has borrowed legal ‘parts’ from a wide variety of sources since 1949, the legal system it has assembled from those parts is principally designed to serve the interests of the governing party rather than to protect inherent rights of its citizens or its private companies.  It is rule by law, rather than rule of law, as was vividly demonstrated with the imposition of the new security law in Hong Kong in the summer of 2020. Despite the slowness and costs associated with it, the U.S. legal system provides a level of predictability and protection for investors and businesspeople which can’t be matched in China.  We can expect to see the Biden Administration act to shore up the foundations of this legal system following the strains put on it by the previous administration.

Level 4:   Wellsprings of Economic Vitality

Two of the deepest sources of support and revitalization for technology innovation in the U.S. are immigration and our capital markets.  Immigration brings a steady stream not only of young and eager workers but also on occasion transformational business talent such as Sergey Brin and Elon Musk. Our capital markets spread risk over a broad pool of investors and investment vehicles, incentivize iconoclastic thinking and efficiently channel capital to the points of likely greatest return.  While China has through its tax policy been impressively building an investment-led structure for its markets, the efficiency and speed of execution of the U.S. capital markets can’t be matched in China.  In broad view, China currently tries to leverage its centralized leadership and ‘command economy’ model to try to neutralize this U.S. advantage as well as hoping to ride the momentum from its high-growth domestic macro-development over the last four decades (and the internationalization of that development model over the last ten years). How China fares in field of competition in the years ahead as it emerges from its fast-growth phase of development and collides with a dire demographic imbalance will be one of the more consequential questions of the early 21st century.

Editorial Note:  Upcoming posts in the TEA Collaboratives T-series on technology topics will pick up and expand on some of the topics identified above.  Our focus in this Technology Competition sub-series will mostly fall under the industry and innovation topics identified above but we will also have occasional invited guest experts to delve more deeplly the legal and capital markets topics.  Also, it’s important to note explicitly that the viewpoint expressed in this post and other future posts in the series are obviously a perspective from the U.S.-side.  We will present the ‘emic’ view (as seen through the eyes of Chinese government planners and officials) separately through our A-series (Ambitions) posts which appear on Fridays.  

As a final note, the Technology Competition sub-series posts introduced in today’s post will alternate on Mondays with our TECH-tonics sub-series posts (which focuses exclusively on issues associated with the micro-electronic supply chain fault-line between the U.S. and China passing through Taiwan).  In any given month, we’ll be producing in alternating fashion two posts in the TECHtonics and and two poss in the Tech Competition sub-series.