Harvard and Google warn of China’s tech dominance
‘China has become a serious competitor in the foundational technologies of the 21st century,’ a new Harvard University report says
Harvard Professor Graham Allison and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have warned that China may lead the world in decisive technologies in a new report for Harvard University’s Belfer Center.
The authors warn “China has become a serious competitor in the foundational technologies of the 21st century: artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, quantum information science (QIS), semiconductors, biotechnology and green energy.
“In some races, it has already become No 1. In others, on current trajectories, it will overtake the US within the next decade.”
The report appeared under the imprint of the Avoiding Great Power War Project. In 2018, Allison advanced the “Thucydides Trap” thesis, warning that a challenge to an established power by a rising power too often leads to war.
The report’s 50 pages summarize material in the public record and offer no startling revelations. I reported most of its contents in my 2020 book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World.
But the weight of the evidence they have compiled is impressive. They conclude with a citation of a 2020 report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: “Given the enormous scale and rate of progress of Asia, particularly China, the United States will find that reversing its own downward slide will be very difficult … If we ignore this issue, declines in the economic well-being of our citizenry and our ability to influence world affairs will be inevitable.”
Especially pointed is the report’s discussion of 5G broadband and its vast implications for virtually every facet of economic life. “Where the 4G era saw Apple iPhones, Google Android OS and Microsoft HoloLens connecting users to the tech ecosystem, 5G is poised to be dominated by Huawei networks offering ubiquitous connectivity for Xiaomi smartphones, Tencent smart city solutions and Baidu robotaxis.”
From the American vantage point, Allison and Schmidt bear ill tidings. Highlights of their report include:
- America’s 5G infrastructure rollout is years behind China’s, giving China a first-mover advantage in developing the 5G era’s platforms … Qualcomm’s Economic Strategy Team estimates that over the next 15 years, 5G will “add an economy the size of India” to the world, the lion’s share of which is on track to be in China.
- China has already surpassed the US in quantum communication and has rapidly narrowed America’s lead in quantum computing.
- China’s AI surge is so recent that anyone not watching closely has likely missed it. Indeed, in many races, China has already overtaken the US to become the world’s undisputed No 1. Consumers’ choices of AI products in markets speak for themselves. In speech technology, Chinese firms are beating American firms in every language, including English.
- China graduates four times as many bachelor’s students with STEM degrees and is on track to graduate twice as many STEM PhDs by 2025.
- Despite the Trump administration’s effort to, as a former NSC staffer described it, “kill Huawei,” the tech giant still deployed more than 300,000 5G base stations in China last year.
- China’s potential to become a semiconductor leader can no longer be discounted; and, on the current trajectory, it is more likely than not that President Xi will accomplish his goal of China becoming a top-tier player in the semiconductor industry by 2030.
- Advantages along every link of the green energy supply chain position China as the global leader [in green energy] for the foreseeable future.
- Because a primary asset in applying AI is the quantity of quality data, China has emerged as the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century’s most valuable commodity.
Notably, Allison and Schmidt concede that Open Radio Access Networks, or O-RAN, the much-vaunted “software-eats-hardware” alternative to Huawei’s 5G, won’t be a competitive factor.
“Widespread 5G networks with real 5G capabilities are still one to two years away in the US, while mainstream adoption of new infrastructure solutions like ORAN (which some have proposed as America’s answer to Huawei) will come too late for the US 5G rollout,” they write.
The distinguished physicist and venture capital investor Henry Kressel warned in several commentaries for Asia Times that O-RAN would take too long, cost too much and present too many security problems to challenge integrated producers like Huawei and Ericsson.
Can America catch up? Education is a stumbling block.
They say: “By total number of undergraduate university degrees in science and engineering, America was the global leader in 2000 with over 500,000, while China stood at just under 360,000. Today, China graduates four times as many STEM students as the United States (1.3 million vs 300,000) and three times as many computer scientists (185,000 vs 65,000). In international science and technology rankings for K-12 students, China consistently outscores the United States in math and science – in 2018, China’s PISA scores, which assesses math, science and reading, were ranked number one while the US ranked 25th.”
One advantage that the authors put in America’s column is that “America can recruit from all the world’s 7.9 billion people, while inherent insularity restricts China to its own population.”
That isn’t quite true. Huawei employs 50,000 foreigners, roughly a quarter of its global workforce, and they do a disproportionate share of Huawei’s R&D. Huawei is less a Chinese company than a true multinational.
Contrary to some Western views, China will not reach a point of stagnation as did Japan, the authors warn. “Japan’s technological ambitions were hampered by ‘Galápagos syndrome’: its innovative technologies were developed in isolation and highly-specialized for the domestic market but struggled to compete overseas.
By contrast, China’s technological growth has been deeply integrated throughout the world, as evidenced by its worldwide rollout of 5G. According to Andy Grove, its capacity to “scale up” the innovations of others has allowed China to rise in the tech value chain from manufacturing to R&D to standards-setting.