Are you familiar with the saying: “Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face?” It is normally uttered to designate those who hurt themselves while trying to hurt others.
But things
have gone so bad for America lately, you might use the saying to describe it as
doing worse than take from others and never give back anything. In fact, you
may describe America as cutting off its receiving hands to prevent them from
giving away something.
As odd as
it may sound, when it comes to technological innovation, this is what the
Americans are doing. In fact, while acknowledging that they consider their
country to be exceptional because it relies on others doing for it what it
cannot do for itself, the Americans whose technological innovations are
sustained by immigrants, are now lying about others stealing their technology.
Thus, to
protect themselves from the fiction of being robbed, the Americans have
announced taking measures to prevent foreign companies from having access to
what they say is their technology. But in reality, these are technologies that
were developed in collaboration with foreigners, people who would love to
continue developing more technologies in America for Americans.
There was
a time that we, in Canada, used to lament about the brain drain to the United
States. We had good reasons to feel that way, given the ever-present American
recruiters on Canadian campuses who were interviewing recent graduates and
about-to-graduate students that exhibited exceptional talent in any field of
technology – and offering them highly paid jobs in
America.
Eventually,
this show disappeared for two reasons. First, American companies bought most of
Canada’s leading edge companies, turning them into branch-plants of companies
in America. This gave the Americans access to the brightest of Canadian
engineers and scientists, who were quickly transferred to the parent companies
in America. Second, the Americans opened the door to students from around the
world to come and study in American universities. Those who did well, were
offered jobs in America, and they proved to be good at innovating and
developing leading edge technologies for America.
Thus, for
America to come now and say that it will block foreign companies, especially
the Chinese, from having easy access to American technology, is to invite the
Chinese to do for themselves what they have been doing for America. This will
deprive America of what it acknowledges has been the source of its exceptionalism.
When you
add to this the reality that America’s primary and secondary systems of
education are so decrepit, they would be rejected by any self-respecting Third
World country, you can imagine what kind of technology will be innovated in a
future America; a former superpower that will be free of foreign students, and rapidly
losing its exceptional status.
More is
said about this matter in an article that came under the title: “America Is
Fueling Chinese Techno-Nationalism,” and the subtitle: “The US campaign to
limit Chinese firms' access to critical technologies has backfired. China has
responded by pursuing its goal of bolstering its technological capabilities
with an intensity unseen since Mao Zedong committed to developing nuclear
weapons six decades ago.” The article was written by Keyu Jin, and published on
February 25, 2022 in Project Syndicate.
The
following is a condensed version of the way that Keyu Jin started her article:
“China
is applying the juguo (whole nation) approach — deploying massive
resources to attain world-class technological prowess. China is pursuing that
goal with intensity. The motivation came when under President Trump, the US
launched a campaign against Chinese companies, which included restricting
their access to US-controlled critical technologies like semiconductors. That
campaign has continued under President Biden, and many Chinese firms face a
similar fate if they are added to the so-called Entity List. These actions have
amounted to a wake-up call for China. Rather than remain vulnerable to the
whims of the US, it needs to become technologically self-reliant”.
This story
played out somewhat differently in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s when the
colonial powers decided to punish the former colonies that got liberated and
refused to remain under the influence of their former colonial masters. To
punish them, the colonial powers blockaded those countries economically and in
other ways, thus forced them to rely on themselves in all sorts of ways.
To do
that, most of the newly liberated colonies began a program of industrialization
that served them well through difficult times. Today, those Asian and North
African nations —
foremost among them China — owe their industrial success to what proved to be the
glory days of their punishment.
In fact, having
successfully completed its program of industrialization, China is now in a
position to repeat that same success in the hi-tech fields. And in the same way
that China’s industrial success has hurt America’s industries, we should expect
that China’s success in advanced technology will hurt America in this field. In
that sense, by taking measures to prevent foreign companies from having access
to “American” technology, the country is cutting its nose to spite its face.
The last
word is left to Keyu Jin who stated the following: