The Chinese Communist Party - our primary strategic adversary- is leveraging China's engineering talent and manufacturing prowess to advance the regime's interests, diminish U.S. power, and assert a totalitarian model of censorship and surveillance on users of China's technology products worldwide. Beijing's explicit strategy for global technological dominance hinges not only on its well-known theft of American technology but also on significant investment in China's own R&D efforts.
China's public spending on R&D has grown 16-fold since 2000, placing it second in the world behind the United States for total spending. This month, China announced an 8.3 percent increase in science and technology spending, among other investments unveiled in an effort to surpass the United States' lead. In several critical technologies - from drones to advanced manufacturing using robots to quantum communications - China is gaining on or already beating the United States in terms of making discoveries and applying them in the real world.
Just as China's commitment to research and development has grown, the U.S. government's has waned. Federal funding for R&D has declined significantly as a share of total spending since its Cold War peak, leaving strategic blind spots in our research ecosystem.
Our private sector and capital markets are the best in the world. But investors tend to gravitate toward easily marketable solutions in sectors such as health care, energy and consumer software apps, while avoiding more challenging or long-term investments in emerging technologies critical to our national security. Beijing's heavy subsidies for its national champions make it even less enticing for American private companies to try and compete in many strategic sectors further jeopardizing U.S. national security.
Just as we did when the Soviet Union drew ahead in the space race, the U.S. must meet the moment by accelerating strategic investments in scientific research and development of future technologies. The space race and U.S. commitment to putting a man on the moon led directly to our world-leading aero- space, microelectronics and internet industries - as well as the trillions of dollars in private economic activity it spurred.
Borrowing lessons from this and other successes from the Cold War, the United States can again widen its technological lead. We should follow two steps:
One, policymakers must sufficiently fu
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.