Washington uses foul play to secure tech supremacy

Instead of building a level playing field as it advocates, the United States is more willing to resort to foul play to keep its tech supremacy.

Chen Gang, a prestigious scientist at MIT, is the latest collateral damage. He had a grueling long year since being arrested in January 2021 for allegedly concealing China affiliations. Last month, US prosecutors dropped Chen's case.

Chen's story is only part of the United States' terribly misguided initiative that brought the McCarthyist mania to the field of knowledge where exchange and sharing are dearly cherished.

This week, the US Department of Justice scrapped the initiative that put Chen into custody, amid strong domestic objections.

"The failure of the China Initiative to produce any results shows the serious flaws in the reasoning behind it," H Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science journals wrote in an editorial published on Thursday.

However, the country's impetus to contain China's tech, with the sleight of hand, has not lost steam.

With a slew of allegations, sanctions and blacklisting, Washington seems unwilling to win a tech battle with its close competitor through fair play. To "make you worse than me" rather than striving for excellence is its tactic.

For a time, trade secret theft was a frequently-used false allegation against China. But according to a cyber-security report published on Wednesday by Beijing-based Qi An Pangu lab, a hacking group affiliated with the US. National Security Agency has conducted cyber-attack against Chinese communications, scientific research departments and economic sectors for more than a decade.

On the other hand, China's patent applications ranked 2.5 times as many as that of the US in 2020, as shown by WIPO data, making the espionage charges increasingly unconvincing.

There is no shortage of evidence making it clear that the US tech policies toward China are often aiming to contain the latter's development.

On Feb. 8, one day after Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group rolled out China's first lithographic machine for chipset packaging, the US government included the company into its Unverified List, citing its inability "to establish the bona fides" of the company.

The US government also used a double standard when it came to supportive tech plans.

China's drive to bolster its advanced manufacturing has been ruthlessly flayed. However, the United States has also rolled out a barrage of its own frontier tech aid programs.

Those programs came down to a huge sum of subsidies, involving 6G, quantum tech, semiconductor, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. And most of them undisguisedly listed China as its top enemy.

To cover up its unsportsmanlike practices, Washington made use of fabricated national security concerns, poorly-grounded human rights abuses and even far-fetched ones like China's scheme to collect American people's gene data.

What made the United States a tech powerhouse after World War II was not the Cold War mentality, but an open, inclusive and collaborative system that fosters innovation -- an architecture China is keen to emulate but the US is putting away.

Washington is good at imagining an enemy but weak in solving its own problems. While ringing a loud warning of China's 5G threat, the US administration got bogged down in the spectrum allocation within its own country for the next-generation wireless technology.

The country's two political parties are divided over multiple issues to renovate its tech infrastructure, especially in the year of its mid-term elections. But seeing China as an enemy turned out to be one of the few things that they agree on.

It benefited none because they did this at a time when international scientific collaboration was urgently needed to address humanity's existential threats, such as COVID-19 and global warming.