The Danger of Exaggerating China’s Technological Prowess

The conventional wisdom about Beijing’s supposed advantages in AI and 5G shows how incomplete tech knowledge can lead to policy mistakes

By Peter Cowhey and Susan Shirk Jan. 8, 2021 9:56 am ET

The U.S.-China relationship will be the great geopolitical rivalry of the early 21st century, and every facet of the competition will involve the two big powers’ capabilities in science and technology. Figures from across the political spectrum worry about a technology race with China, and many Americans fear that China has already surpassed us in such frontier technologies as artificial intelligence and 5G broadband communications. “China has stolen a march and is now leading in 5G,” then-Attorney General William Barr declared in a recent keynote speech at a Justice Department conference on China. Graham Allison of Harvard University warns that China “is currently on a trajectory to overtake the United States in the decade ahead” in artificial intelligence.

The conventional wisdom about China’s supposed advantages in AI and 5G shows how easy it is for incomplete understanding of technologies to lead to misjudgments and policy mistakes. Balancing economic and security considerations requires considerable knowledge of specific technologies—not just a current snapshot but also a sense of how the fundamentals will shape their evolution. We believe that the most effective U.S. policies will pair openness to China with scrupulous efforts to manage the risks posed by specific technologies.

Let’s start with AI, where outdated analogies have led to wrongheaded policies. Prof. Allison has dubbed China “the Saudi Arabia of the twenty-first century’s most valuable commodity”: data. But this fashionable metaphor implies that China’s larger supply of data—garnered from its more than one billion people, with very limited privacy protection—gives it a big advantage. Chinese machine-learning algorithms can be trained on far larger data sets, this line of thinking contends, and can thus advance more quickly and powerfully than their American counterparts.

This assessment makes two fundamental errors. For one, data aren’t interchangeable. Machine learning depends on specialized data sets, not mountains of undifferentiated data points. For another, this argument ignores the law of diminishing returns. Infinitely larger supplies of an input like data don’t produce infinitely better results; indeed, they may actually reduce performance. For many AI tasks, machine simulations are more productive than mountains of data.

When people think of AI functions that must be sequestered from China, they are often thinking of AI as a specific device or program, like HAL, the omniscient computer in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But AI is actually a variety of procedures applied to different tasks. Almost all AI research is public and conducted by a global community of researchers. Only a very few applications for specialized security tasks need to be classified and subject to export controls.

Besides computing power, the biggest driver of AI is human talent. The U.S. leads the world in AI because it attracts the best researchers in the world. If the U.S. slows down those talented scientists by locking up their work as national-security secrets or restricting them from taking on Chinese students, they will simply take their skills elsewhere. Canada is just a short plane ride away. Overclassifying research to preserve scientific primacy is a quick road to decline.

The American debate about 5G mobile broadband also illustrates the dangers of failing to understand long-term technology development. In recent years, Washington has obsessed about the potential for espionage and sabotage thought to be inherent in the use of equipment from Huawei, the Chinese company with the world’s largest share of 5G radio access network equipment, or RAN. Some have concluded that the U.S. should cripple Huawei to restore U.S. dominance.

The Trump administration’s campaign against Huawei persuaded only a few close U.S. allies to ban the firm’s inexpensive and well-engineered offerings. Debates still rage over whether much stricter security measures short of a ban could make Huawei-related risks manageable, but current U.S. policy fundamentally misunderstands the factors determining 5G competitiveness and security.

Huawei’s first generation of 5G RAN base stations is a modified version of the older 4G infrastructure that yields faster speeds. The ultimate promise of 5G is an ubiquitous network customized to user needs. Trillions of devices and applications—known as the Internet of Things—using 5G technology will offer new solutions for everything from autonomous vehicles to industrial production management to remote surgery. But the drivers of 5G’s evolution will be semiconductors, software systems and cloud computing—areas in which the U.S., not Huawei or any other Chinese company, is the world leader.

Instead of being intimidated by Huawei, U.S. foreign policy makers should recognize the Chinese company’s situation, which is akin to the dominance that IBM enjoyed during the age of mainframe computing. IBM’s massive scale and proprietary standards and software made it hard for competitors to match its offerings. Only in the 1970s and ’80s, when Japan massively subsidized new competitors like NEC, did IBM falter. But the true decline of IBM and its Japanese competitors came with the rise of the internet. The web’s transparent standards enabled many new firms to “plug and play.” Semiconductors, software and desktop computing eventually led to the apps on your smartphone at a fraction of the cost of such functions 30 years ago.

Today, 5G is at a similar moment. A new generation of technological standards for 5G would allow specialist suppliers—like the Microsofts and Intels of the internet era—to compete against Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung. Control via the old RAN infrastructure will be diminished by control via cloud computing and software, which plays to a key U.S. strength. Introducing these standards will take concerted action from U.S. firms, along with targeted U.S. government support, such as the adoption of procurement requirements to embody these new rules.

The 5G Internet of Things will connect tens of thousands of suppliers of devices and pieces of software with massive rivers of data flowing across national borders. China will be a major security problem, but only one of many. Think of the challenge posed by the 5G Internet of Things as a massively scaled-up version of the cybersecurity threats that pervade networked computing today. As such, 5G security will need to follow today’s cybersecurity template of carefully designed risk management.

Weighing such trade-offs is a job for politicians and diplomats with a sophisticated grasp of the underlying technology. A security strategy aimed at eliminating all risks from technological engagement with China would fail, and as we have seen, even many U.S. allies won’t join us in breaking such ties. Tech-savvy policy leaders must find more productive ways of managing the risks of engagement with China while boosting America’s innovation ecosystem and competitiveness.

Prof. Shirk is chair of the 21st-Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, where Prof. Cowhey is dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy. Both are members of the Working Group on Science and Technology in U.S.-China Relations, which recently released a report entitled https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-danger-of-exaggerating-chinas-technological-prowess-11610117786

The part about 5G, I do not even know that point they trying to make. They suggest Huawei will not retain its lead in 5G because of new standards coming out for the 5G enabled applications. Like, duh, of course, Huawei mostly just builds the 5G network. What they do not seem to realize, the standards for these new 5G enabled apps, need a 5G network. First the 5G network must be built, then the app must be built. It has to happen in that order, and they do not seem to realize that. It would have been more helpful if they told us the state of the USA 5G network.