China’s long-standing and rampant “innovation mercantilist” policies harm global innovation by taking market share and revenues from more-innovative foreign competitors, thereby diminishing the resources they can invest in research and development toward further innovation. ITIF has conducted analysis on this issue, as listed below.
China
June 10, 2021
June 8, 2021
ITIF hosted an expert panel discussion discussing EU-US digital trade relations and what both governments should do to foster closer relations without sacrificing U.S. digital innovation.
May 21, 2021
Limiting technology deployment based solely on where it is manufactured is an ineffective security countermeasure—not just for drones, but for most technologies—because the country where a product is built has no direct bearing on whether it is secure.
May 10, 2021
China’s long-standing and rampant “innovation mercantilist” policies harm global innovation by taking market share and revenues from more-innovative foreign competitors, thereby diminishing the resources they can invest in research and development toward further innovation.
April 27, 2021
The Biden administration needs to renew America’s role as a power trader, but with a new focus of maintaining its relative lead, economically and technologically, over China. It will require changes in the strategy and organization of U.S. trade policy.
April 26, 2021
Chinese high-speed rail firm CRRC is less innovative than European and Japanese firms, but mercantilist policies help it dominate in China and expand globally. This starves superior firms of revenue, reduces their R&D, and slows the pace of global innovation.
April 19, 2021
ITIF hosted a robust debate on this question. Professor Michael Klare has written that “Biden’s Tough Stance on China Will Lead to Global Climate Doom.” He argued that cooperation is essential and can be done in parallel without weakening the U.S. negotiating position on other matters. ITIF President Rob Atkinson tackled the opposing position.
April 15, 2021
U.S. leadership in cloud computing depends on having fair access to global markets. But the Chinese Communist Party has targeted the sector with a suite of protectionist measures that are helping its local champions improve their capabilities, competitive position, and global operations.
April 14, 2021
The United States has a long and successful history for industrial policies, and as the Biden administration and policymakers consider new policies, some raise concerns with its “similarities” to China.
March 29, 2021
With the rise of China, the U.S. economic and technology environment has fundamentally and inexorably changed. America needs an advanced technology industrial policy to compete effectively—but that will require modernizing hidebound economic thinking that has long considered “industry policy” to be anathema.
March 8, 2021
There weren’t many Chinese tech companies that the Trump administration didn’t sanction or at least threaten. What did that achieve in the technological race with China? What was the impact on the American brand writ large? And what should the Biden administration do next?
March 7, 2021
Passing a time-limited tax incentive for firms that move Chinese production to U.S. Labor Department–designated “labor surplus areas” would weaken China’s economic and technological capabilities by reducing production there while strengthening U.S. capabilities by increasing domestic production, and it would help economically distressed and disadvantaged cities and counties across the nation.
February 18, 2021
China’s mercantilist strategy to grab market share in the global semiconductor industry is fueling the rise of inferior innovators at the expense of superior firms in the United States and other market-led economies. That siphons away resources that would otherwise be invested in the virtuous cycle of cutting-edge R&D that has driven semiconductor innovation for decades.
February 8, 2021
But these generous policies so far have not resulted in market dominance. To date, only 148 of COMAC’s planes are confirmed to have been purchased.
January 20, 2021
Understanding how Germany manipulated the global trading system to degrade its adversaries’ capabilities, entrap nations as reluctant allies, and build up its own industries for commercial and military advantage—just as China is doing—can shed light and point the way for solutions to the China challenge.
November 30, 2020
Fearmongers claim the 5G sky is falling: China is way ahead, and drastic measures are needed to catch up. But these claims are often based on poorly understood comparisons of 5G deployment. China’s 5G stats can paint a misleading picture if taken at face value.
November 23, 2020
Recent years have seen China increase its spending on basic and applied research, which is likely to drive its innovation going forward and could be a large factor behind an eventual Chinese leadership role in global innovation.
November 23, 2020
With protectionist policies shielding their rear flank domestically, China’s digital firms are out to capture global market share. Their strategy hinges on state-backed innovation mercantilism—and their success will come at the cost of U.S. jobs, exports, and economic growth.
October 13, 2020
A new study has found that firms with CEOs who turned 18 during the Cultural Revolution spend less on R&D, generate fewer patents, and receive fewer citations to these patents.
October 8, 2020
Rob Atkinson talked to Kula Partners principals Carman Pirie and Jeff W. White on their Kula Ring podcast about how U.S.-China relations are affecting manufacturers, particularly North American firms with supply chains in China.
October 7, 2020
ITIF hosted a discussion of these issues, including how U.S. businesses are likely to be affected and what the U.S. government should do in response. An expert panel will discuss a recent ITIF report arguing the United States and its allies should focus on rebalancing global supply chains, bolstering competitiveness, adjusting to China’s market size, and solidifying the West’s appeal.
October 5, 2020
WASHINGTON—Excessive subsidy-powered competition from China decimated solar photovoltaic manufacturing in the rest of the world in the 2010s, eliminating multiple innovative companies and altering the path of innovation, according to a new report released today by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), the world’s top-ranked think
October 5, 2020
China’s subsidy-aided rise to dominance in PV manufacturing has driven prices way down, but at the cost of undermining promising alternative technological pathways. Policymakers should adopt measures to sustain greater diversity in PV and similar technologies.
September 21, 2020
The study finds that for technologies that China has identified as strategic, a patent application’s risk of rejection rises from 16.6 to 25.6 percent if it is foreign, an increase of 54 percent.
September 10, 2020
“The cloud market is growing quickly in China in part because individual and business broadband adoption is still growing at a robust pace,” said Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank for technology policy. The group’s board includes officials from Amazon. com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and other U.S. cloud providers.