How to understand China’s technological ambition?

This newsletter is penned by Lu Jiafei, a contributor to Beijing Channel

Chinese telecom company Huawei officially launched its operating system HarmonyOS 2 for smartphones on Wednesday. The launch came at a time when Washington continues to restrict Huawei from accessing key U.S. technologies and products in an attempt to lock the company out of the global 5G market. It also came as technological development becomes a high priority for both Washington and Beijing.

While Huawei's launch focused on “connection” and working across devices without any mention of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, U.S. media has billed the launch as “an attempt to challenge Google’s dominance in smartphone software.”On the other hand, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua has emphasized “more diversified choices” for users.

Your host would like to first note that for news junkies whose mother language is English, they must have been quite familiar with the U.S. narrative that China is striding on the way to challenge and replace America as the No.1 technological power in the world.

While it is more than reasonable to assume that, yes, for any country in the world, it does not hurt to be the leading technological power, your host would like to note that by reading and studying the Chinese version of the same story, it may leave you with an impression that China’s focus on technological development is more inward-looking than you may think.

You may ask what does “inward-looking” means. After studying Chinese President Xi Jinping’s public speeches on technological development in recent years, your host would like to note that “inward-looking” means that instead of seeking technological hegemony, as Washington was and is doing, China is pursuing technological advancement after drawing from historical lessons, with the primary aim of maintaining its economic growth and protecting itself from external technological stranglehold imposed by Washington.

Historical Lessons

For the Chinese leadership, the period between the 1750s and 1940s were two lost centuries for the technological development of China, which have profoundly negative impacts on China’s match-up to the rest of the world.

For example, in 2013, Xi said when the Industrial Revolution began and flourished from the middle of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty “closed their doors to the outside world and lost the development opportunities brought by the Industrial Revolution. As a result, China's economic and technological progress lagged far behind the pace of world development.”

(从十八世纪中叶到十九世纪中叶，大概是一百年时间，是工业革命发轫和蓬勃发展的时期，而当时清朝统治者闭关锁国、夜郎自大，失去了工业革命带来的发展机遇，导致我国经济技术进步大大落后于世界发展步伐)

In the following century, China became a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, and “there was no condition to either carry out national construction or catch up with the pace of the times.”

For Xi, China missed another golden opportunity of scientific and technological development in the ten years starting from the mid-1960s when the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命) was raging on.

（上世纪六七十年代，国际上兴起一场科技革命和产业变革浪潮，东亚一批国家和地区抓住这个机会发展上去了，我国在闹“文革”，错失了良机。）

Because of the lost centuries-long window of opportunity, your host would like to note that China's modernization is quite different from that of western developed countries. If the western developed countries have developed through a “serial” process, in which industrialization, urbanization, agricultural modernization, and digitization occurs one by one, China’s development model is a “parallel” one, in which all the development stages occur almost simultaneously.

In 2013, Xi summarized the Chinese development mode as follows:

“Over the past 35 years of reform and opening up, many aspects of China's development have gone through the development course of several hundred years of western developed countries, in which science and technology have played an important role. To promote the simultaneous development of a new type of industrialization, informationization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization, we must also give full play to the role of scientific and technological progress and innovation”

（改革开放三十五年来，我国发展的很多方面走过了西方发达国家上百年甚至数百年的发展历程，科技在其中发挥了重要作用。我们要推动新型工业化、信息化、城镇化、农业现代化同步发展，也必须充分发挥科技进步和创新的作用。)

Also in 2014, Xi said in a speech at the Seventeenth Academician Meeting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Twelfth Academician Conference of the Chinese Academy of Engineering that “in modern history, one of the roots of China's backwardness is the backwardness of science and technology.”

（历史告诉我们一个真理：一个国家是否强大不能单就经济总量大小而定，一个民族是否强盛也不能单凭人口规模、领土幅员多寡而定。近代史上，我国落后挨打的根子之一就是科技落后。）

Maintaining Growth Drive

In an article published in 2019, Xi summed up the reasons for China to emphasize innovation as follows:

“Although China has become the second-largest economy in the world, it is big but not strong, fat and also weak. This is mainly reflected in China's weak innovation capacity. This is the ‘Achilles heel’ of such a giant economy. Leading and driving development through innovation has become an urgent requirement of China's development. That is why I have repeatedly stressed that innovation means development and innovation means the future.”

（虽然我国经济总量跃居世界第二，但大而不强、臃肿虚胖体弱问题相当突出，主要体现在创新能力不强，这是我国这个经济大块头的“阿喀琉斯之踵”。通过创新引领和驱动发展已经成为我国发展的迫切要求。所以，我反复强调，抓创新就是抓发展，谋创新就是谋未来。）

Your host would like to point out that as early as 2013, the Chinese President already stated that the necessity of innovation is “forced by the situation”（创新驱动是形势所迫）.

“The unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable development of China is still prominent, and the pressure on population, resources, and environment is increasing. China's modernization involves more than one billion people, and it is difficult to continue the old way of relying on production factors for growth. The more we use material resources, the less it will be left. Nevertheless, the more you make use of science and technology and talents, the more gains you will get. So we must shift to the innovation-driven development track as early as possible, to better release the potential of science and technology innovation.

“我国发展中不平衡、不协调、不可持续问题依然突出，人口、资源、环境压力越来越大。我国现代化涉及十几亿人，走全靠要素驱动的老路难以为继。物质资源必然越用越少，而科技和人才却会越用越多，因此我们必须及早转入创新驱动发展轨道，把科技创新潜力更好释放出来。”

In his speeches over the past years, Xi has particularly emphasized the relations between the energy technology revolution and industrial upgrading.

For example, in 2014 he said that China should “follow the new trend of the international energy technology revolution, take green and low-carbon as the direction, promote technological innovation, industrial innovation, business model innovation, and closely integrate with other fields of high-level technology, so as to cultivate energy technology and its related industries into a new growth point to drive the optimization and upgrading of China's industries.”

（推动能源技术革命，带动产业升级。就是要立足我国国情，紧跟国际能源技术革命新趋势，以绿色低碳为方向，分类推动技术创新、产业创新、商业模式创新，并同其他领域高新技术紧密结合，把能源技术及其关联产业培育成带动我国产业优化升级的新增长点。）

Tackling “Stranglehold Problems”

Your host would like to note that if history is any guide, Washington does seek to perpetuate its technological hegemony by hitting whoever runs too close after it. What is more, unlike Japan and other U.S. allies in Europe, China is more of an easy target because of its different political system.

The Chinese expression of “kabozi”（卡脖子）technologies ,or “stranglehold technologies” has appeared many times in Xi’s speeches and Chinese media reports over the past years. You can put those key and core technologies indispensable to economic and national security into the category and that the expression of “kabozi” mainly gained popularity in 2018 when China’s telecoms equipment maker ZTE suffered from an equipment ban imposed by Washington. The U.S. sanction has exposed China’s semiconductor industry as one of the weak links in electronics manufacture.

An opinion by People’s Daily Online then commented about the significance of grasping core technologies as follows:

“After 40 years of reform and opening up of high-speed development, China has achieved the transformation from ‘running after’ to ‘running with’ and then to ‘leading’ in some fields. However, if you build a house on someone else's foundation, the higher the building, the greater the risk. If one does not master the core technologies, sooner or later it will suffer from strangleholds by others; if a country's important pillars are not erected on its own foundation, its development is shaky.

(经过40年改革开放的高速发展，中国实现了从“跟跑”到“并跑”再到一些领域“领跑”的转变，但“在别人的地基上盖房子，楼越高风险越大”，不掌握核心技术，迟早会被别人卡脖子，国之重器不立足于自身，容易动摇发展的根基。”

In one article titled “Striving to become the world's leading scientific center and innovation highland”（“努力成为世界主要科学中心和创新高地”）published this March, Xi wrote that past history has repeatedly told us that key core technologies cannot be bought and asked for.

“Only by grasping key core technologies in their own hands can one country fundamentally protect its national economic security, national defense security, and other security.”

（只有把关键核心技术掌握在自己手中，才能从根本上保障国家经济安全、国防安全和其他安全。）

“（We must) dare to take the road not taken by previous generations, and strive to achieve independent control of key core technologies, so as to keep the initiative of innovation, the initiative of development firmly in our own hands.”

（敢于走前人没走过的路，努力实现关键核心技术自主可控，把创新主动权、发展主动权牢牢掌握在自己手中。）

At the end of this newsletter, your host understands that you may still be puzzled whether China is seeking either a technological arms race with America or even the technological hegemony.

Xi’s relevant remarks in front of a domestic audience may be of some help.

“Our emphasis on independent innovation is by no means meant to pursue innovation behind closed doors. In the context of deepening economic globalization, the flow of innovation resources around the world is accelerating, and the economic, scientific, and technological links between countries are becoming closer.”

（我们强调自主创新，绝不是要关起门来搞创新。在经济全球化深入发展的大背景下，创新资源在世界范围内加快流动，各国经济科技联系更加紧密，任何一个国家都不可能孤立依靠自己力量解决所有创新难题。）