Guancha: Any possibility for China and the US to foster all-round/all-level technology cooperation in the near future?

Goldman: The outlook for the near future is bleak. The very near future is clouded by the Ukraine war, which motivates Washington to put more pressure on China in order to dissuade China from giving help to Russia. Of course, technological cooperation between the United States and China is already enormous. America buys $600 billion a year of Chinese products, including most of our consumer electronics. US companies have extensive production as well as research facilities in China. The two economies never have been more integrated, despite specific sanctions that stop certain areas of technological cooperation. Private business has fostered this cooperation for decades.

There are some areas of research, moreover, that are difficult to conduct outside of China, for example, Big Data medical research that draws on China’s abundance of medical data. American companies that make chip development software tools and chip-building machines depend on Chinese customers, as to the makers of smartphone chips. In the absence of specific action to suppress technological cooperation, private business will continue to expand it.

Guancha: While the US is accusing China for its lack of transparency in information and communication, we have always witnessed how strictly the info provided by many western media are selected. Do you think the Information Cocoons would hinder the understanding of American people of China, thus jeopardizing the Americans’ decision of ways dealing with China?

Goldman: We have had some disturbing examples of censorship, for example the suspension of Donald Trump’s Twitter account after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot, or the suppression of a New York Post report about alleged improper business relationships in the Biden family just before the last presidential election. At the time, 51 retired senior US intelligence officers published a statement claiming that the New York Post story was a Russian disinformation operation, and the big social media platforms suppressed the report. Recently, the New York Post story was confirmed.

These are worrying developments, but I don’t think they have much to do with American perceptions of China. The relevant information isn’t suppressed so much as ignored. Americans are very insular. More than 300,000 Chinese now study at US universities, while only 20,000 Americans study in China. Chinese civilization is very different from the West, and it takes time and effort to understand why.

One hears all the time that America made a mistake in helping China’s economic development, for example by supporting China’s membership in the World Trade Organization, because America believed that prosperity would lead China to become a liberal democracy like the United States. In fact, many Americans believed this; because we are a nation that absorbs immigrants from the whole world, including China, we assume that the rest of the world naturally should become more and more like us.

Like many countries, we like to blame outsiders for our own failings, and we associate China’s remarkable economic growth with some of our own failures, sometimes unfairly. In my view, China is a formidable competitor, and its successes should motivate Americans to abandon our complacency and work harder to maintain our technological leadership. I want China to be prosperous, secure, and a step behind the United States. But American can achieve this only by running faster, not by tripping China.

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