"The Resilience Requirement: Responding to China’s Rise as a Technology Power" - by CWP alum Andrew Kennedy

China’s rise as a technology power in recent years is striking. In areas ranging from quantum communications to 5G networks to hypersonic weaponry, China is making a mark on the global technological landscape. The country  is constrained by many challenges, including a stifling political environ- ment, sluggish state enterprises and an underdeveloped financial system  – not to mention a daunting international environment. Despite these and other problems, however, China’s growing technological capabilities have become impossible to ignore.1 This presents the United States and its partners with a difficult dilemma.  They can remain open to collaborating with China in pursuit of several ben- efits: scientific knowledge, economic prosperity and China’s constructive  dependence on the outside world. Yet openness risks fuelling China’s rise in worrisome ways, especially since foreign technologies and know-how may be channelled into the Chinese military or into Orwellian-sounding  internal-surveillance and -monitoring systems that tighten the govern- ment’s political control. Reducing openness mitigates these risks, but it also  limits the rewards while intensifying China’s pursuit of technological self- reliance and potentially exacerbating differences between Washington and  its partners.

Andrew B. Kennedy - To cite this article: Andrew B. Kennedy (2023) The Resilience Requirement:
Responding to China’s Rise as a Technology Power, Survival, 65:1, 115-128, DOI:
10.1080/00396338.2023.2172858 - To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2023.2172858

Andy Kennedy specializes in international politics, with particular interest in China, India, and the United States. His current research focuses on the globalization of innovation, US-China high-tech rivalry, and China’s rise as a technology power. He has also published widely on the foreign policies of China and India in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. His research has been supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, among other sources.

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/r-q-3635702/