Driven to Self-Reliance: Coercion and the US-China Innovation Ecosystem

• In Event: China and Coercion in International Politics

Abstract

Technology plays a central role in a state’s core objectives – security and economic development. As innovation systems are increasingly international and fragmented – geographically dispersed across national borders, and through outsourcing, organizationally partitioned between firms – countries and companies cooperate to catch up and stay at the innovation frontier. Interdependence, however, also generates new vulnerabilities as states may take advantage of economic collaboration for coercive ends. This creates a dilemma for countries as to how to balance the drive for growth with the risk of dependence. Nowhere are these trade-offs more apparent than in US-China relations.
In this paper, we argue that the way states resolve this tension is in part driven by endogenous interactions between them and their adversaries. In particular, as states leverage interdependence for coercive ends, target states respond by securitizing the science and technology space. To test our argument, we engage in a media analysis of Chinese newspapers including half a million articles in the CKNI database from 2005 to 2020. We find significant evidence that US coercion shocks – the Snowden affair and the Trump administration’s aggressions – produce a shift in discourse away from a period of technological indigenization, which combined development goals with technological independence, to a new period of security-focused self-reliance. Each period was marked off by the promulgation of new Chinese technology policy initiatives on the one hand, and external events on the other. Our paper has important implications for understanding how great powers navigate economic interdependence as well as the way in which core domestic goals like technological innovation are wrapped up in international interactions.

Authors

• Mark Peter Dallas, Union College

• Yeling Tan, University of Oregon

• Abraham Newman, Georgetown University

• Henry Farrell, Johns Hopkins University