{"id":2283,"date":"2019-02-04T16:54:41","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T16:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blackopspartners.com\/?p=2283"},"modified":"2019-02-04T16:54:41","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T16:54:41","slug":"the-wests-china-blind-spot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/the-wests-china-blind-spot\/","title":{"rendered":"The West\u2019s China blind spot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The West has a blind spot when it comes to China\u2019s technological advances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What&#8217;s happening:&nbsp;<\/strong>Again and again, the West has shown that it misunderstands China&#8217;s true competence in the technologies of the future \u2014 artificial intelligence, quantum science, robotics, and more. Alternatively under- and over-estimating China&#8217;s progress, the U.S. and Europe are left simply unmoored in terms of tracking their primary geopolitical competition.Show less<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What it looks like:<\/strong>&nbsp;Whiplash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>In an&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/crispr-china-embryo-gene-editing-05630ce3-2599-43a5-85ee-e40b3f66d0a3.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">utterly unexpected announcement<\/a>&nbsp;last month, a Chinese scientist said he had produced a genetically edited embryo.<\/li><li>In recent years, there has been a headline-grabbing explosion of AI papers from Chinese researchers,&nbsp;followed by analyses suggesting that&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/newsletters\/axios-future-f5b3cbb0-b2ce-48c7-928d-601c5483bcbe.html?chunk=1#story1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Chinese research lags significantly behind<\/a>&nbsp;American and European work when accounting for impact.<\/li><li>Over the last year, major advances have been announced by Chinese companies that most in the West have never heard of \u2014 like MiningLamp, a big data company that\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.crunchbase.com\/organization\/mininglamp#section-overview\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">attracted big-name investors<\/a>.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Several factors contribute<\/strong>&nbsp;to the trans-Pacific information gap:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Unlike military hardware that<\/strong>&nbsp;can be publicly demonstrated, virtual technology like AI and quantum computing is difficult to scrutinize, especially because they are at their core difficult to understand.<\/li><li><strong>The Chinese government deliberately<\/strong>&nbsp;sows confusion in official announcements and state-controlled media. The aim is sometimes to send rivals scrambling toward a dead end, says Elsa Kania, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security.<\/li><li><strong>A narrow focus on major cities<\/strong>&nbsp;\u2014 Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen \u2014&nbsp;that leaves out major universities and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/11\/25\/business\/china-artificial-intelligence-labeling.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">data-annotation outfits<\/a>&nbsp;that contribute to China\u2019s AI rise, says Jeffrey Ding, a researcher at Oxford&#8217;s Future of Humanity Institute.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Combined, these factors and others have often left the West<\/strong>&nbsp;in the dark. MiningLamp, for example, is barely mentioned in English literature but is well known in China, says Joy Ma, a researcher at UChicago&#8217;s Paulson Institute. As a result, U.S. and European companies and officials don&#8217;t know how to respond appropriately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>Now, the West has swung<\/strong>&nbsp;from discounting Chinese innovation to panicking, depicting an unstoppable tech juggernaut. Against this framing, the U.S. is considering ways to preserve the American tech advantage, like&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/trump-export-controls-harm-tech-research-national-security-9561b8a4-7f74-45dd-8162-2807fa7d8ed1.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">imposing export controls<\/a>. But sanctions can be overkill, too.&nbsp;<\/li><li>The reality, says Kania, is somewhere in the middle.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Axios science editor Andrew Freedman writes:&nbsp;<\/em>Policy decisions made now will determine whether the U.S. successfully competes with China for the lead in scientific and engineering research, or squanders it through a mix of underfunding and poorly crafted legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>It&#8217;s conceivable that China,<\/strong>\u00a0not the U.S., will be the next country to land a human on the Moon, while also rivaling the U.S. and the E.U. in weather prediction in as little as a decade from now \u2014 a field with many military applications.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Read more at <\/em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\" aria-label=\"Axios (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/china-ai-quantum-tech-blind-spot-8c7204f7-1b22-47b9-846c-e2c6ceb15c78.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Axios<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The West has a blind spot when it comes to China\u2019s technological advances. What&#8217;s happening:&nbsp;Again and again, the West has shown that it misunderstands China&#8217;s true competence in the technologies of the future \u2014 artificial intelligence, quantum science, robotics, and more. Alternatively under- and over-estimating China&#8217;s progress, the U.S. and Europe are left simply unmoored [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[14,28],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackopspartners.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}