Sabotaging America’s Innovation Engine
As I arrived in China in June 2011 to help a division of a large Indonesian company with their patent strategy, I was surprised at how much China was doing to strengthen its intellectual property (IP) laws and to encourage innovation. China continued strengthening its IP laws and system year after year throughout my stay, which ended in 2020. These changes, plus many incentives and investments in innovation, advanced China’s expertise in ways that have caught the West off guard.
The U.S. tendency to downplay Chinese innovation should have been firmly shaken with the October 16, 2021 Financial Times headline that rocked the world, especially the U.S. military: “China tests new space capability with hypersonic missile.” China had just launched a nuclear-capable hypersonic rocket that circled the globe at high speed and “took US intelligence by surprise.” The Financial Times noted that Chinese innovation in hypersonic weapons “was far more advanced” than U.S. officials had realized. This was not technology China stole from the United States, as should be obvious from a headline in The Wall Street Journal from September 18, 2023: “Hypersonic Missiles Are Game-Changers, and America Doesn’t Have Them.” After the international embarrassment China caused our military, U.S. media quickly tried to minimize the damage (“not much of a surprise” per The New York Times, and nothing but old Russian technology per Foreign Policy).
For a nation that supposedly only steals Western inventions, in industry after industry China is taking a leadership position in technology and in international patents that can’t be won by copying. According to a 2023 study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute funded by the U.S. State Department, China is now leading the world in 37 out of 44 technologies critical for economic growth and defense, areas once largely dominated by the United States.
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