"The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 3: Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future

This week I'm sharing the third installment from the day-long conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at Johns Hopkins SAIS on April 3rd in Washington — "The China Debate We're Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead." The first two episodes featured Jessica Chen Weiss's opening remarks and the panels on what China wants and what the United States wants. This week's panel — "Tech, Rivalry, and Competing Visions of the Future" — turns to the domain that, more than any other, has come to define how Washington thinks about the U.S.-China relationship: technology, and especially AI.

Once again, my deep thanks to Jessica Chen Weiss, ACF's inaugural faculty director, for organizing this terrific conference and for so generously letting me share this audio with Sinica listeners.

Moderator Kat Duffy of the Council on Foreign Relations opens by interrogating the very framing of the panel: is "rivalry" actually the right word for what's going on between the U.S. and China in tech? The panelists give a range of answers — from "yes, because both sides believe it is" to Samm Sacks's pithy rejoinder that "rivalry serves specific actors and specific interests." From there the conversation ranges across the FCC's recent move to bar most foreign-made routers, the pitfalls of framing AI competition as a sprint to AGI rather than what Jeff Ding calls a "diffusion marathon," the many internal Chinas that get flattened in DC discourse, the cybersecurity reciprocity problem (Volt Typhoon, Salt Typhoon, and what President Trump tellingly admitted about all of it), and what it would actually mean for the U.S. to compete by being its best self — what one panelist memorably calls "Americamaxxing." There's a lot of substance packed into this hour, and a lot of generative pushback against received DC wisdom.

The audience Q&A at the end takes up the role of race and xenophobia in the discourse — a topic that, as one questioner pointedly notes, had been conspicuously absent from the day's earlier discussions.

Panelists:

— Samm Sacks, Senior Fellow, New America and Yale Law School

— Jeff Ding, Assistant Professor of Political Science, George Washington University

— Mieke Eoyang, Visiting Professor, Carnegie Mellon University; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy

— Selina Xu, Lead for China and AI Policy, Office of Eric Schmidt

Moderator: Kat Duffy, Senior Fellow for Digital and Cyberspace Policy, Council on Foreign Relations

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