The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology’s official news site, Science and Technology Daily, recently published an article “Who was finally trapped by the ‘small yard, high fence’?” The article referred to a strategy adopted by the US to restrict Chinese access to key technologies.
Washington’s actions to curtail Beijing’s technological, scientific, and economic advancements under both Trump and Biden administrations have produced contrary results. In the chip industry, after the US government restricted shipments of chipmaking equipment, US manufacturers found themselves more reliant on the Chinese market. For example, China accounted for 43% of sales for Applied Materials (February-April), up 22 points year-on-year, and 42% for Lam Research (January-March), up 20 points.
A recent study, “Building a Wall Around Science”, by researchers at several US universities, found that decreased scientific cooperation with China has adversely affected the US STEM community. From 2016 to 2019, Chinese graduate students became 16% less likely to attend a US-based PhD program and 4% less likely to remain in the US upon graduation.
Furthermore, there was a sharp decline in Chinese usage of US research in citations, not reciprocated by the US scientific community. The “heightened anti-Chinese sentiment in the US” negatively impacted US-based Chinese researchers’ productivity. In contrast, Chinese-based researchers’ productivity was not impacted by a decline in US science usage.
China has been focusing on increasing its technological self-reliance, demonstrated this month when a software update from the US CrowdStrike cybersecurity giant caused outages in Windows-based systems worldwide. Aside from some international hotels and businesses, China’s key infrastructure, including banks, airlines, government services, and payment services, was largely unaffected.
Source: Dongsheng News on China, July 27, 2024.
See also: South China Morning Post, Jul 17, 2024. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3270675/us-anti-china-wall-built-around-science-backfired-america-report