More and more these days, politicians and pundits are pushing the “new Cold War” narrative to describe tensions between the U.S. and China.
In terms of potential for military conflict, such a label may prove premature. But when it comes to the battle for scientific and technological dominance, it is absolutely appropriate.
Few things illustrate the Asian Leviathan’s scientific aspirations as does a looming experiment that, if successful, will go down as perhaps the greatest accomplishment in medical history — a full head transplant. The goal of intrepid Italian Dr. Sergio Canavero and his Chinese colleague, Xiaoping Ren, is to provide the “patient,” most likely someone with a degenerative disease whose mind is in full working order, new life via a new body, presumably one that belonged to the otherwise healthy victim of head trauma.
While the duo have claimed breakthroughs, most in the medical community remain skeptical. But the experiment’s success, or lack thereof, is secondary to what the mere attempt tells us about the rules that dictate the scientific battle between East and West. After all, there’s a reason the researchers have chosen China as the setting for their audacious experiment: Neither the EU nor the U.S. would approve such a risky procedure.
Despite its growing secularism, science in the Western Hemisphere is not immune to the Judeo-Christian ethic that has shaped much of Western thought. China, on the other hand, evolved alongside numerous Eastern philosophies such as Confucianism, which holds that life begins after birth, and a militantly atheistic Communist regime. This very different spiritual trajectory no doubt gives the Beast of the East an advantage in the current race for scientific (and by extension, economic and military) dominance.
The resulting ethical disparity has enabled Chinese researchers to carry out groundbreaking experiments that would have never passed muster at Western research institutions.
Consider recent headlines announcing a Chinese research team’s possible creation of genetically edited babies, a world first. Despite the team’s stated intention of protecting offspring from diseases such as HIV, the effort was met with outrage in the West due to its reckless nature and enormous potential for misuse, including the production of “designer babies.”
The achievement (or crime, depending on one’s point of view) was made possible by the CRISPR gene-editing tool, developed partly in America. Yet, CRISPR’s ramifications are so profound that Western scientists have been hesitant to take the leaps now being made by their Asian colleagues.
Less than a year ago, Chinese scientists likewise shocked the Western press by successfully cloning macaques. While the process relied on the same technique that Scottish researchers used to clone Dolly the sheep more than two decades ago, the cloning of macaques brings science significantly closer to human cloning, an act that has been consistently met with widespread resistance by the international scientific community.
While Western societies have married science and ethics for decades, in China, such considerations are in their relative infancy. The result is a lack of regulatory oversight that makes possible experiments that have significantly improved China’s image as a premier destination for world-class research. In fact, China surpassed the U.S. this year to become the world leader in peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Some of this success, of course, is the result of China’s increasing willingness to throw ever larger amounts of money toward promising, next-generation technologies, including the headline-hogging game changer that nearly all experts agree will determine who owns the future: artificial intelligence.
To truly harness the power of AI, however, governments need data, and lots of it. As Kai-Fu Lee points out at MIT Technology Review: “A very good scientist with a ton of data will beat a super scientist with a modest amount of data. China has the most mobile phones and internet users in the world — triple the number in the United States. But the gap is even bigger than that because of the way people in China use their devices.”
And whereas our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and other legislation here at home present obstacles to collecting citizens’ data, China can simply take it.
With a massive population, companies’ reliance on government approval, and intrusive surveillance, China has easy and legal access to the massive data sets necessary to weaponize AI, giving it a precious advantage over the US and other world powers. Given all of China’s obvious advantages, one must ask: Is it even possible for the U.S. to compete with one scientific hand tied behind her back? The answer is yes, if it is done strategically.
America’s scientific ethic has enabled the lion’s share of the world’s scientific breakthroughs. Authoritarian attempts at scientific dominance, such as the strategies pursued by the Soviet Union and North Korea, have fallen flat.
There’s no reason to believe that the scientific cold war with China will play out any differently, provided we invest wiser, run leaner, and think methodically about the road ahead.
Greg Jones runs The Drunk Republican blog. Follow him on Twitter at @DrunkRepub.
