US needs Sputnik moment to respond to China narrowing technology gap, says think tank

China’s “dramatic progress” in technological innovation has rapidly narrowed the gap with the United States and requires a response from Washington similar to the strategy implemented in the 1950s and 1960s when challenged in the space race by the Soviet Union to maintain its advantage, according to a US think tank.

“Had China been 80 per cent behind the US a decade or so ago, it would be just 50 per cent behind in the most recent year,” said the report by Washington-based non-profit organisation Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which was written by founder and president Robert D. Atkinson and research assistant Caleb Foote.

The conclusion came from the examination of 36 indicators, including the research and development input as a percentage of gross domestic product, basic research expenditures, the number of people with bachelor or master degrees, the number and quality of universities, the number of patents as well as the use of broadband communications and industrial robots.

“If China is only a copier, then the risk to advanced economies is limited. But if China is more like the Asian tigers that rapidly evolved from copiers to innovators, the threat is serious,” the report stressed, referring to countries like Japan and South Korea that have developed into world-class innovators.

“There is no reason to believe China will not follow the same path – only with significantly greater impacts because the Chinese economy is massive, Chinese policies are more aggressively mercantilist, and it is much more difficult to get China to compete fairly.”

In 1957 Russia launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, and in 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, but through its technological capability and significant investment, it was the US who landed the first humans on the moon in 1969.