In the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco, pundits wheeled out the usual superficial tropes used to analyse US-China relations: discussion of the politics of the island of Taiwan, even though experts doubt any present danger; negative statistics about Chinese growth; seemingly unrelated prognostications about former US president Donald Trump. Blow away the fog of war, though, and the issue at the root of US-China rivalry is dominance in scientific research.
The United States remains the heartland of breakthrough and frontier science; China’s manufacturing ecosystem generates the applied science that makes the breakthroughs scalable and usable. It can be tempting to focus on the diplomats insulting each other, but science shapes our future – and China is gaining on the West, fast.
It’s not a zero-sum game though; Chinese scientists have been enriched by American institutions, just as the US has been enriched by Chinese scientists. Increasingly, politicians on both sides recognise that the future must be built together.
California Governor and likely 2028 presidential contender Gavin Newsom was just in China, riding around in a car by Chinese electric vehicle company BYD and talking about climate collaboration. He didn’t shy away from discussing issues like Chinese production of fentanyl precursors or human rights across East Asia – issues that matter in California, a state with more than 2 million citizens of Chinese descent.
The city of San Francisco has been linked to China (not the state, but the civilisation) since early days; but even as tech companies in the Bay Area race to define the future of AI and everybody tries to cope with climate change’s unpredictable effects, it seems clear that China’s biggest influence on California will be on its future, not its past. San Francisco is one of the top five metropolitan areas for scientific research worldwide; Shanghai and Beijing are both on that list, too.
Scientific competition is very significant in US-China relations. During the 20th party conference last autumn that saw his power confirmed, Xi said: “We must regard science and technology as our primary productive force, talent as our primary resource and innovation as our primary driver of growth.”
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China’s Shenzhou 16 space crew returns to Earth after 5 months in orbit
China’s Shenzhou 16 space crew returns to Earth after 5 months in orbit
Broad-ranging US restrictions on Chinese access to semiconductors have deeply alarmed the Chinese government, motivating a shift towards domestic production and state control. For China, US hegemony is the problem and science is the solution. That includes applied science (like scaling up the production of solar panels, affordable EVs and batteries) and basic science (like AI and quantum computing).
For somebody like Newsom, whose state is ahead of the pack in pushing EV adoption, access to Chinese brands like BYD, whose Seagull model costs around US$10,000 new, would make government money go much farther.
But the BYD Yangwang U8 he tested out in Shenzhen won’t be available to American consumers for a while to come, if ever; meanwhile, Trump has been telling anyone who will listen that EVs are a hoax that will shift the industry to China (and no doubt, part of the larger conspiracy of pretending that climate change is real).
In the past, and to a large extent still, the American and Chinese science communities have been deeply intertwined. That is why when Stanford-educated He Jiankui genetically edited babies using the Crispr technique, a Chinese court threw him in jail. To a large degree, the desire to conform to global standards and benefit from scientific collaboration would have driven that decision. (He is now out of jail and reportedly has a new position in Wuhan.)
That is why Chinese representatives went to the recent AI conference at Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom, and why news of Sam Altman’s ouster from OpenAI dominated my WeChat feed the day afterwards. And that is why Newsom foregrounded climate issues and collaborations – with the help of a climate institute at Berkeley – on his visit to China.
Competing in basic science can drive the US and China apart – just look at semiconductors, or “Made in China 2025”. But it might also bring the two together – in discussions of AI regulation or climate cooperation.
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Biden is freezing out China’s tech industry
Biden is freezing out China’s tech industry
Either way, it should be clear from Xi’s comments and human resources decisions – such as naming Chen Jining, an environmental scientist who has published dozens of research papers, to the highest post in Shanghai – that the Chinese leadership is dreaming of scientific breakthroughs, not bombing Taipei; the HR decisions tell the story.
Months before the 20th party conference last year, Cheng Li, a researcher formerly at the Brookings Institution, also argued that technocrats are a rising class within the Communist Party.
While we hear a lot about ideology and nationalism, we hear less about the promotion of serious scientific researchers to senior political posts, even as China adopts a whole-of-country approach to achieving breakthroughs in fields such as semiconductors, the energy transition, space and biotech.
In this context, Biden and Xi’s agreement to renegotiate the US-China science pact hopefully foreshadows a policy of coexistence and – when it comes to climate change and other issues that threaten American lives – cooperation.
If we look past the news cycle of recriminations and spats between the superpowers, we’ll realise that US-China competition is at its most consequential in the race to the frontiers of scientific research. As Newsom said after meeting Xi, divorce is not an option.
Scientists jockeying for tenure and Nobel Prizes all follow the scientific method and a recognised set of rules. The US and China should too, as we power our way to an ecologically sustainable future.
Jacob Dreyer is a writer and editor based in Shanghai
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