China's Next Act by Scott M. Moore

Author:Scott M. Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Real Techno-Challenge: Countering China’s Applied Research and Deployment Advantage

Crucially, the NIS framework does not mean that countries like China are incapable of innovation. Instead, it predicts that certain institutional features of China’s political, economic, and social system make it less likely to produce radically new technologies. But transformative innovation is not always the goal, and when it comes to applied research and technological deployment, China’s NIS holds some important advantages.134

These advantages were highlighted with respect to AI by technologist and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee in a widely cited 2018 book, “AI Superpowers.” Unlike more mundane inventions, Lee portrayed AI as a transformational technological advance on par with electricity. In much the same way that it took large-scale public investment to achieve widespread electrification, Lee argued that realizing AI’s potential would require a powerful government to bear the risks of large-scale development and adoption.135 To Lee, that meant China’s top-down approach to technological development, while less efficient than that of countries like the United States, might nonetheless allow Beijing to effect “brute force transformations” and take “big bets on game-changing technologies” like AI.136 Similar conclusions could be found in studies showing that China’s state-dominated NIS demonstrated a remarkable ability to marshal technological resources in pursuit of national priorities like building high-speed rail.137

What is clear is that in certain technology fields, Beijing proved content to lead in deployment rather than basic research, helping Chinese firms grow market share even as they remained behind foreign competitors in cutting-edge R&D. Apart from AI, this was apparent in the field of robotics. Throughout the early twenty-first century, American companies and research institutions stood, by most accounts, in the forefront of basic robotics research, and US industries were far more heavily automated than their Chinese counterparts. As in many other technological sectors, though, Beijing put forward big plans to become a robotics superpower. Its Robot Industry Development Plan (RIDP), issued in the mid-2010s, aimed, among other things, to increase China’s “robot density” to 100 robots for every 10,000 human workers, a goal it surpassed in 2018 by 40%, putting it within striking distance of the comparable American figure of 200 robots for every 10,000 human workers.138 In absolute numbers, meanwhile, China put far more robots into service than any other country, boasting nearly 800,000 by 2019, as compared to the United States’ roughly 300,000.139

At the same time, boosted by policy support from Beijing, Chinese robot suppliers began to steadily increase their market share at the expense of foreign competitors.140 This position promised to help Chinese firms take advantage of growing demand for services robots, in addition to the industrial robots that had long dominated the sector. Chinese firms like JD and Alibaba, encouraged by the RIDP, became leaders in certain service robotic applications like automated restaurant equipment and even robotic coffee shop baristas.141 In China, demand for these contactless services increased dramatically during the pandemic and looked set to continue to do so worldwide, potentially conferring on Chinese firms a significant long-term commercial advantage.142

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