Research & Development

will prove irresistible to key companies and countries.82 Indeed, despite recent market volatility from China’s crackdown on its domestic tech firms, in 2021, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JP

Morgan, and Invesco have taken steps to establish joint or wholly

owned mutual fund products in China.83 Even at the height of the Trump Administration’s trade war in 2019, U.S. FDI into China increased.84

Research & Development

Source : OECD, 2021

In its landmark 2020 report, “The Perils of Complacency,” the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sounded an alarm. Documenting China’s

rapidly increasing R&D expenditures that are slated to soon overtake

the U.S., it warns that “the future of the nation depends on taking action to assure a vibrant and productive R&D enterprise.”85

82 Thomas Hale, Siobhan Riding, Wang Xueqiao, “Wall Street brushes off political tensions to dig deeper into China,” Financial Times, September 9, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/01f92c8b-11dc-431c-adaf-c299e3964ff1.

83 Aaron Back and Telis Demos, “American Banks Have What They Want in China. Their Fate Is Still Out of Their Hands.” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-banks-have-what-theywant-in-china-their-fate-is-still-out-of-their-hands-11635499841.

84 Michael Schuman, “How to Get U.S. Companies to Leave China,” Bloomberg, December 28, 2020, https:// www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-12-29/u-s-should-give-manufacturers-incentive-to-leavechina?sref=H0KmZ7Wk.

85 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “The Perils of Complacency: America at a Tipping Point in Science & Engineering,” AMACAD, 2020, https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/Perils-ofComplacency_Report-Brief_1.pdf.

The U.S. and China have been neck and neck in R&D spending since 2017, together accounting for nearly half of global R&D expenditure.86 Measured by PPP in 2010 dollars, between 2000 and 2019, U.S. R&D expenditure almost doubled, growing from $360 billion to $610 billion. Chinese R&D investments, meanwhile, grew by a factor of 13, from $40 billion to $515 billion.87

America’s decline in innovation is also chronicled by the Bloomberg Innovation Index, which began tracking top innovating countries in 2013. While the U.S. began as number 1, it had fallen out of the top 10 by 2020.88 And although China still lags behind the U.S. (at number 16 compared to U.S. number 11), it is catching up. As our earlier report on the “Great Tech Rivalry” noted, China’s laser-like focus on frontier technologies has positioned it to dominate races like 5G and AI in the future.89 Moreover, in former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work’s apt summary, “A lot of people still believe that all China does is steal technology and copy it. They still do that, and they’re quite good at it. But also their technological ecosystem and their innovation ecosystem is really, really good. And it’s getting better all the time.”90

86 Beethika Khan, Carol Robbins, and Abigail Okrent, “The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2020,” National Science Board, National Science Foundation, January 15, 2020, https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20201/preface. 87 OECD (2021), Gross domestic spending on R&D (indicator), Accessed on 2 February 2022, https://data.oecd.org/ rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm

88 Michelle Jamrisko, Wei Lu, and Alexandre Tanzi, “South Korea Leads World in Innovation as U.S. Exits Top Ten,” Bloomberg, February 3, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-03/south-korea-leads-worldin-innovation-u-s-drops-out-of-top-10.

89 Graham Allison, Kevin Klyman, Karina Barbesino, and Hugo Yen. “The Great Tech Rivarly: China vs the U.S.” Harvard Belfer Center, December 2021. https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/GreatTechRivalry_ ChinavsUS_211207.pdf 90 Robert Work, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of U.S. - China Technology Competition,” Council on Foreign Relations, Online Panel, March 30, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRUsT2C4E78.