Tech Won't Save Us - How US-China Rivalry Distracts from Tech Harms w/ Yangyang Cheng

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Yangyang Cheng to discuss the growing divide between the United States and China, and how nationalistic narratives distract us from a better understanding of tech in both countries. Yangyang Cheng is a particle physicist and research scholar at Yale Law School. She’s written for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, WIRED, and many others. You can follow Yangyang on Twitter at @yangyang_cheng.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Yangyang wrote about the myth of the TikTok spy and the US fixation on Chinese espionage for Wired.She mentioned the coming expiry of a science and technology agreement between the US and China. It’s been temporarily extended.Paris recently wrote about the benefits the US receives from the global footprint of its tech companies, and why that makes China look like a threat.Support the show

What I've seen a lot of the discourse has become is, oh, China is doing this, so that is bad, because China is bad. And if we, as in the United States or the West, do the same thing, that is not only good, but often framed as necessary because China is doing similar things. And that just becomes like, it's incredibly intellectually lazy and logically inconsistent. And at the end of the day, it's morally indefensible. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Yangyang Cheng. Yangyang is a research scholar at the Yale Law School and has a history as a particle physicist. She's written for a number of publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and Wired. In this week's conversation, we're talking about the relationship between the United States and China and how these growing divides between these two countries, pushed for often geopolitical interests, have effects on science and on kind of scientific collaboration between

these two countries, but also have kind of broader impacts on societies as narratives designed to, you know, make one country look better than the other, or to make one country's tech industry look like it's kind of benevolent and great, while the other one is authoritarian and domineering, are designed not to ensure the public interest and to ensure that we have a good understanding of what these countries and these tech companies and whatnot are actually doing, but to try to get us to kind of be on one side of a growing geopolitical rivalry as the United States in particular feels that its position in the world is increasingly being threatened by a rising power. And so I wanted to discuss this with Yang Yang,

because she wrote a really fantastic piece, or really a couple of fantastic pieces in Wired, that I think have a really great perspective on how this works and how she has experienced this as a scientist who came from China and studied in the United States, but also did work in Europe, and so has a lot of experience with these kind of international collaborations, but has also watched the kind of reception of Chinese science and Chinese scientists change over the time that she has been doing this, as well as kind of observing these broader narratives and shifts that have happened, especially in the past few years, as the United States has been trying to draw a greater divide between itself and China,

and to present the Chinese government, the Chinese state and Chinese tech as an inherent threat to the United States and to the US public. But the question then is, of course, who actually benefits from those narratives and from presenting things in that way? Is it really the US public or the Western public or global public that benefits from that? Or is that designed to benefit kind of the national security state, the surveillance interest, the tech companies that are based in the United States, which is, of course, what I think. And that is not to say that everything that China does is absolutely great and fantastic and we should have no concerns there but I think that by accepting these kind of

narrow and reductive geopolitical frames that makes it very difficult for us to get a better understanding of what is actually going on in these countries and what their companies are actually doing and what is motivating them. For example, are Chinese tech companies motivated by serving the Chinese state or are they motivated by similar interests to US tech companies? And that is to get a return on capital, to increase the amount of exploitation that they can engage in to benefit their bottom lines and their shareholders at the end of exploitation that they can engage in to benefit their bottom lines and their shareholders at the end of the day. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Yang Yang. I think it was very illuminating, and I hope that you enjoy it as well.

And I'm really looking forward to reading more of her work in future as she continues to write about these topics. So if you enjoyed this conversation, if you feel it gave you a bit of a different perspective on this kind of rivalry between the US and China, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, you can join supporters like Peter from California, Fred from Montreal, and Chris from Brooklyn by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Yang Yang, welcome to Tech

Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to chat. You had this recent piece in Wired, I guess it was a couple weeks ago now, that I read. And once I read it, I was like, okay, I need to have you on the podcast to dig into this because, you know, obviously the kind of relationship between the U.S. and China is very important now, not just on a broader geopolitical level, but especially when we're talking about tech and kind of the competition between U.S. and Chinese technology companies. Right. And the various narratives that we have around how those

companies work and their goals and their aims and all these sorts of things. And I thought that your piece gave us a really great perspective, not just on how you have kind of experienced that as an academic who moved from China to the United States, but also kind of what that means on the broader kind of geopolitical level and who this impacts. And so I wanted to start by talking a bit about your experience, and then we can move into those kind of broader critiques and observations that you have. And so you wrote about what it was like to come to the United States as an academic from China and how that has changed since you first made that journey. So can you talk to us a bit about how the openness of academics from China has changed in the United States and what your experience was like?

Thanks so much for this question. So I guess I'll probably answer it since it has a personal angle to it. So I was born and raised in a medium-sized city in central eastern China, and I finished undergraduate in China as a physics major. And I came to the U.S. to pursue my PhD in physics in the fall of 2009. And I was trained as a particle physicist, and I worked on the Large HadS. to pursue my PhD in physics in the fall of 2009. And I was trained as a particle physicist, and I worked on the Large Hadron Collider for over a decade. And I think these markers are kind of important in terms of contextualizing my own personal experience in U.S. academia because I worked within a large international collaboration or multiple large international collaborations throughout my physics career that to an extent, because the Large Hadron Collider is physically located in Europe at

the European Center for Nuclear Research and is part of an international collaboration, there is more openness and there is even on a technical level, like some of the governing agreements under the funding agencies or under international agreements. So it has shielded some of the more intense scrutinies in my own academic career compared with some of my other colleagues who work on smaller scale US-based experiments, or especially working on things that are considered more applied or that touches on some of the more sensitive, I will put, scare quotes around them, like say, quote unquote, quantum or quote unquote, AI or whatnot. more sensitive, I will put, scare quotes around them, like say, quote-unquote quantum or quote-unquote AI or whatnot. So yeah, but even in a discipline that upholds a certain cosmopolitan ideal or

aspires to a cosmopolitan ideal, there is still impacts of geopolitics. And I would also say, I don't want to exceptionalize U.S.-China relations in terms of its impact on international collaborations in science. For example, after Trump's Muslim ban, there was a very direct impact on a lot of my colleagues who come from Muslim-majority countries. And so I think these are some of the important things to keep in mind, that US-China relations and its impact on scientific collaboration often takes up a lot of oxygen in the conversation. But sometimes that warps the overall context that this is on one hand, from a historical perspective,

from a vertical standpoint, not necessarily new. On the other hand, there's a horizontal perspective that the world is not just the US and China. There are other layers to this tension as well. That makes a lot of sense, right? And we have seen that over time with as the focus of US politics changes, then different people can get kind of wrapped up in whatever those initiatives are that are going after different people from different parts of the world who, you know, are perceived to be potentially like working for someone else or whatever, right? When you talk about the kind of difference between like the local and the domestic and the consideration of who is foreign, you know, in those perspectives or in those laws or in those initiatives, because one of the things that you talk about is how the United States had

what was called the China initiative that was specifically looking at Chinese academics within the US system and kind of prosecuting them for for just absolutely ridiculous things that made no sense. Can you give us a bit of an insight into that and how that works? Yeah, sure. And I think if I would put a little add-on to the earlier question, which ties to your current one about the China initiative specifically, is that in terms of understanding U.S.-China relations and the tensions that impact science and technology development, one thing is also like if we recognize countries and their peoples with their full agency, then it's not just the U.S. side unilaterally making decisions or taking steps that damages the bilateral relationship. There are

certainly Chinese entities, including at government levels, institutional levels, or even individuals who have made mistakes or who have done certain things, including cutting off research access and certain things that contributes to this cycle. And with that in mind, coming to the China initiative. So the China initiative by itself started under the Trump administration, was formally announced by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. However, it has a much longer history in terms of the scrutiny on U.S.-China scientific collaborations or on especially ethnic Chinese scientists working at U.S. institutions.

The underlying context to this is more on the Chinese side. For my parents' generation, they would probably be the first generation who came of age in China. But if they were academics in the 80s, they were the first generation who may be able to go to the United States for work or study in this earlier opening

of bilateral scientific exchange between the United States and the People's Republic of China. And of course, on the Chinese government side, when they allowed Chinese students and scientists to go to the United States to work or study, it wasn't altruistic and it wasn't saying that respecting their freedom of choice, but it was very much hoping that it would be a way to train a younger generation of Chinese scientists,

engineers, and tech workers who may be able to come back to China or in some way contribute to the scientific development and educational development in China in direct or indirect ways. However, scientists are also people. And so for decades after that, China was still quite poor and the resources and conditions for scientific research and higher education are limited. And so Chinese scientists overwhelmingly, when they had the opportunity to go abroad, chose to stay abroad to continue their work, which is all very, very understandable. So I started university in 2005. When I was an undergraduate in China, it was also during, I guess, the beginning or the middle of China's economic boom that the government launched its flagship talent recruitment program that's almost become a slur

in U.S. policy circles now, the 1000-called Thousand Talent Plan. And it was really just a high-level talent recruitment program to attract overseas scientists. The program itself is not exclusive to Chinese nationals or ethnic Chinese people, though the language often appeals very directly to sentiments of national belonging, saying, especially when the website has been taken offline, but the homepage of the Thousand Talents Plan before had these lines in Chinese saying, the motherland needs you, the motherland welcomes you,

and motherland is waiting for you to come back and things to that effect. So it was really appealing to sentiments of national belonging. And these are all, was welcomed on the US side because the Chinese government was providing different levels of funding for U.S.-based scientists, majority are ethnic Chinese,

but then to go to China to take on different types of research collaborations or visiting professorships or different levels of employment or just honorary titles. What has happened is through this process, and some of that is tied with the nature of Chinese bureaucracy, that there are indeed abuses or neglects in these contracts that there may be what on the U.S. side would be seen as conflicts of interest in terms of time commitment or financial incentives. And some of that was not necessarily properly reported to funding agencies in the U.S. for U.S.-based scientists in their own employment agreements. And then there are also probably more serious issues of academic misconduct in terms of there are scientists who participated in a wide host of Chinese talent

programs. Thousand Talent is most well-known, or I guess probably at this point most notorious one, who may have, say, violated confidentiality during peer review process or things like that. So there are indeed individual misconducts in terms of compromising the integrity of the scientific process. And then there are very individual cases there may be an intellectual property infringement. And the United States has been aware of this at some point, but I think the extra scrutiny being placed on it is not proportional to the type of misconduct. Because as we say, a lot of these are academic misconduct and can be resolved through academic means if there are indeed misconduct. It's like, say, students cheat and then they can face academic discipline for

cheating, but it doesn't mean the students should be sent to jail for it. So how the U.S. government has responded to it has less to do with the specific types of academic misconduct, and it really doesn't have much to do with upholding academic integrity. But it has become this mischaracterized rhetoric saying these talent recruitment programs or collaborations are conduits for, quote-unquote, intellectual property theft, even though in the majority or overwhelming majority of these researches, there is no proprietary information involved. It's just open research. And the U.S. government's response to it is overwhelmingly, at least at the start, was

through prosecutorial means, through the Justice Department. So that's a really, really long backstory to what led to the official launch of the China Initiative in the fall of 2018, as announced by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And what was really interesting is because the FBI is not the agency to investigate issues of academic misconduct on a very basic level. A lot of times with missed high-profile investigations is investigators, this is not to disparage their work, but they do not necessarily understand the science involved and do not really know whether this is proprietary information or this is just really very basic research that is open and public by construct. And what is also really interesting is even though the China Initiative received a lot

of publicity, both in the media and also from the Justice Department itself, the Justice Department never really gave a clear definition of what the China Initiative is or what cases fall under its purview. And the best investigation on what the China Initiative was probably came from MIT Technology Review by a group of journalists there who built a database by looking at the case files and the press releases saying which are the ones that mentioned the China Initiative. But the takeaway is the China Initiative, But the takeaway is the China Initiative, even though by the Justice Department's own rhetoric is not meant to racially profile or target any specific nationality or ethnicity, about a close to 90% of the people who were

investigated by or faced charges from the China Initiative are ethnic Chinese. So there is indeed a very targeted outcome. And there are also a few high-profile cases, including where there may be overly enthusiastic FBI agents who just used Google to search for Chinese scientists or the labs that hire a lot of Chinese people. And so I think this comes to another layer was just when it became a Justice Department initiative, when it became something that is driven by the criminal justice system, then the incentives becomes very different. It becomes a way just like to catch a spy or to be able to have that case count. And it becomes very much removed from what the initial goal was. And the Justice Department

actually recognized its mistakes to some extent. And here I would give credit to a lot of them are first-generation Chinese immigrant scientists. And so the Chinese American community, the Asian American community, and Asian American community, and other civil rights groups and academic communities and professional organizations have made a lot of effort in terms of public advocacy and policy lobbying to push back on this. And so the Justice Department announced a formal end, ending the China initiative in name a year and a half ago in February of 2022. However, what is important in terms of that ending is ending in name where the Justice Department acknowledged that it made tactical mistakes, that, quote-unquote, the China

initiative was not the right approach. And to face the host of, quote-unquote, threats from nation-state actors, in particular China, needs, quote-unquote, a broader approach. So a lot of the investigations that opened under the China Initiative are actually still going on. And then this is a really long-winded answer, so I'll just add one more thing. The China Initiative by itself was launched by the Justice Department and was under the Justice Department. But there are also being a much wider range of investigations done by funding agencies themselves that do not necessarily send people to jail, but can very easily cripple careers in particular. I know that the NIH has launched a wide range of investigations that have impacted a lot of careers overwhelmingly or disproportionately impacting ethnic Chinese scientists in the U.S. Interesting. I appreciate you kind of laying out that history for us and explaining how it has worked and how, even though the China initiative proper, you know, has been kind of formally ended, you know, a lot of these processes are still ongoing. And I wonder, you know, I want to pivot a little bit away from the focus on academia and

what it means for academics in particular, and just, you know, kind of move it into the greater kind of geopolitical question of what is going on here, right? Obviously, we see a growing divide between the United States and China over the past number of years. After these countries were very close to one another for a long time, the US was very invested in getting a lot of production moved over to China, taking advantage of Chinese workforce and all those sorts of things. As you mentioned, you know, still had kind of collaborations with China on science and these other in these other areas. But over the past few years, that has really started to shift where the US has taken a very different perspective toward China, a very different kind

of policy approach to China. And I'm sure China has has also shifted a bit as well. You know, how would you describe the reasons behind that shift and what is the impact of it? Yeah, I'm really glad that you mentioned there are also related issues in terms of US-China relations of trade or manufacturing and such. And so it was really interesting

because when I came to, well, my current research focuses on the development of science technology in China and US-China relations, but I came to this as a trained particle physicist. And I thought this is a science and technology story. But the more I learned about this, I realized it's not so much about science and technology per se, but this is really a story about labor and capital. And so if we go back to the earlier history, of course, like there was the earlier in terms of the history of the People's Republic of China, the earlier era of the long isolation of the Mao years between China and the West. And then when China was opening up, I mentioned there were incentives from the Chinese government side, hoping that by allowing young Chinese scientists and students to go abroad to study. It's a way to help build up

China's own science and technology and educational sectors. On the other hand, on the United States side, it's not entirely just altruistically, quote-unquote, helping China either. These are highly trained individuals from China coming through a very, very competitive process. So in a way, they are effectively like human capital being recruited into the U.S. And this is placed into a broader trend of post-World War II, quote-unquote, high-tech immigration to the United States from developing countries. And then these individuals themselves, of course, they can aspire to better research environment and a higher standard of living.

So to an extent, all three parties, the Chinese government, the U.S. government, and these Chinese scientists themselves have something to gain from this exchange. And this has been the case for a few decades till about 10 or 15 years ago. But what has changed is this relationship to an extent, the high-tech immigration to the U.S. is a process that follows the logic and the hierarchy of imperial extraction, right? It protects the United States at the center or at the top of the hierarchy, it extracts value, whether it's in the form of manufactured goods, or in the form of, quote-unquote, a human capital or high-tech labor, or other forms of value to its center. However, as China develops its economy and rises up in the hierarchy of global capitalism to contest U.S. hegemony. That shifting of relations

is, in my opinion, and I'm not alone in thinking this, is really the underlying tension here. And the flow of value or the net flow of value is no longer one-dimensional. And this is how a lot of these issues with intellectual property infringements or disagreements have become more exposed. Because on one hand, I acknowledge and it's true that a lot of Chinese entities have had a very poor track record in terms of adhering to intellectual property protection. On the other hand, all property, including intellectual property, are constructed concepts, and what is owned or not is constructed. Something can only be stolen if it's owned in the first place, and who owns it and who has access to share these are things that are determined by relations of power. And so to an extent, Chinese entities, the government or society, or entities have been cheating. That's what the U.S. government has been accusing.

But it has been cheating in a game that is rigged heavily in favor of the U.S. And before this wasn't that much a problem, even for U.S. companies, they would rather accept intellectual property infringement as a necessary bargain in access to the Chinese market. And it was really when this economic, quote-unquote, balance or calculus is starting to shift, no longer so overwhelmingly favor the U.S., that a lot of these sentiments have begun to change. That's so fascinating to hear you describe that, right? Because it is a critique that you hear often of, you know, the larger economic model kind of from the left, right? How you have these countries like the United States that

are in kind of the center or the core of the economy. And, you know, they talk about kind of developing, you know, the global south or, you know, these other countries around the world. But actually what happens is they extract a lot of that value to keep themselves kind of developing, you know, the global South or, you know, these other countries around the world, but actually what happens is they extract a lot of that value to keep themselves kind of at the top of this kind of global economic hierarchy. I feel like an aspect of this that was not kind of in the tech conversation for a long time was how, you know, the rollout of the internet and its kind of global expansion was also a product of and helped to benefit US power, right? Because all of a sudden you had these US companies that were able to expand globally and dominate

these markets around the world. And for a while that was treated as like, oh, this is spreading democracy and prosperity to the world. Not that it was ensuring that the US had a lot of control over what was happening in these markets and US companies were kind of gaining because of that. But now I feel like in the past, I don't know, 10 years or so, that perspective has started to back in, especially as those companies face more competition from companies in China and to a lesser degree, other parts of the world

that are now able to more effectively compete with them. And now that is part of what seems to be forcing the United States to really change its perspectives on China and its approach to China. Because as you say, instead of being able to just extract value back to the United States and for U.S. companies, Chinese companies are now becoming much more competitive with the U.S. companies themselves. And some of that value is flowing to China now instead. And the United States seems to want to, you know, kind of stop that or limit the ability of China and Chinese companies to do that. Do you think that is a good

way to see what's happening there? Yeah. And I would also contextualize it in a bit is I do not want to excuse the Chinese government's behavior that the Chinese government, of course, China is an integral part of global capitalism for the past four decades. But the Chinese government does hold overwhelming control over the flows of capital and its development. And it does have a whole set of policies that overwhelmingly favor domestic industries and businesses. And because of China's size in different dimensions of size, that holds a lot of leverage. So a lot of US companies or Western companies in general do have to contend and accept conditions in China that they would not accept elsewhere in other developing countries. And to an extent, there has been a certain aspiration on the part

of a lot of U.S. companies that they were hoping they could just like wait it out or in some way that as China becomes more integrated into global capitalism, including this World Trade Organization or other forms of global governance for global capital, that they would eventually be able to bargain for more favorable conditions. So some of this is partly China's economic rise, but partly it's also some of U.S. companies have been losing, not just losing patience, but realizing that what they were hoping for is something that the Chinese government would never agree to or accede to. And so that is also a major contributing factor to the worsening relationships between the two countries, including between the two capitalist markets. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense, of course, right? One of the things I found interesting in one of the pieces that you wrote was how certainly China is infringing on larger power, right? Taking academics from the European

Union and from other parts of Europe, you know, helping former Nazis come over to become scientists in the United States because it recognized the importance of kind of getting that human capital as you described before, right? And so the U.S. now seems to have a problem with it because it's in the kind of top position, but when it wasn't, it was acting not so dissimilarly, it seems. Exactly. So I think what I mentioned earlier that like one would say China is cheating, but it's cheating in a game rigged heavily in favor of the U.S. in terms of intellectual property protection.

And if one look at legal history in terms of how different countries with different social contexts and legal traditions respond to issues of intellectual property, the most important connecting factor is its stage of economic development. And so as you mentioned earlier, when the United States was by itself a developing country, a young republic, newly independent from Great Britain. It actually, including Alexander Hamilton, was writing these proposals and things to extract or gain high-level skilled workers and machinery from Great Britain and from Europe, often in violation of their countries or the European Empire's immigration and export control regulations. And then later on, even up until

the early 20th century, the United States grabbed a lot when the Center of Scientific Development is still in Western Europe. The United States obtained a large number of chemical patents from Germany as claims of World War I reparations or whatnot. And of course, what's very well known after World War II with the best known is Operation Paperclip, but it's actually part of a much larger set of programs to extract technology and highly trained personnel from Nazi Germany to the United States in these what was deemed then strategically important sectors. These are behaviors that the United States has been engaged in. And what is interesting about China is, of course, up until very recently, where the

Chinese government still claims China is a developing country, but it's very unevenly developed. But just like a few years ago, when Xi Jinping made this famous speech about tightening intellectual property regulations in China with this note that China has transitioned from a major importer to a major exporter of intellectual property. And so at this stage of economic development for China, it's also stepping up its intellectual property regulations. But then, of course, that is to favor its own national interests. I know that we talked about academia earlier, and then our focus is not

necessarily just on academia, but one important thing with regards to why issues of intellectual property theft, including the China Initiative when it started, had an explicit focus on academia as the Justice Department was saying the traditional openness of academia made it more vulnerable to intellectual property theft or nefarious behavior from Chinese entities. But one important underlying note is the privatization and commercialization of academic research in the United States over the past four decades since the Baidu Act of 1980. So to an extent, when universities behave more like companies, then U.S. government agencies, including law enforcement, are also more likely to treat them like companies in terms of litigating these protections over quote-unquote

trade secrets or proprietary information. Yeah, I think that's such a good point. And I was going to ask you about it if you didn't bring it up yourself. So I'm very happy you did. I think it's important context to understand, right? Because we can sit here in the present and we can say, wow, it's so terrible that, you know, other places are taking intellectual property or whatever, without recognizing that a lot of this work used to be considered kind of just public knowledge, you know, was in the public domain when it was created by universities, which is still where a lot of US kind of research development and especially basic

research occurs. But then there's this process to privatize that, to patent it so that then it can be kind of turned off into companies. And we know, especially in the past number of decades, how universities have been kind of a key part in the kind of startup in tech ecosystem where you have these students who are creating these things at the universities and then they patent them and then they, you know, kind of turn off their startup out of academic work that they were doing. You know, Google, of course, famously was founded that way. And so you see this kind of very distinct shift that begins to happen and that is particularly promoted by certain universities before it's adopted as a wider standard.

Yeah, exactly. So on one hand, on the university level, this commercialization of research also has a direct impact on what kind of questions are being pursued or being prioritized, right? So it has much more profound impact than just very specific on individual patents or ownership by itself. On the other hand, there is also, when we were talking about the recent history of shifts in intellectual property protection, another important point is 1996 was when the Economic Espionage Act was signed into law by Bill Clinton, and this was when intellectual trade secret theft became a federal crime. So on one hand, we see even now, like, say, the University of California, Berkeley had this protracted lawsuit with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT over access and use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology.

And so this sounds pretty wild, like this is a public university. And another institution of higher learning with a lot of the research funding are from the public. Why would they sue each other over a piece of technology that is intended in a sense for medicine? So it's for the public good. And so that exposes some of the fundamental fallacy in terms of like, okay, there is interest, but who's interested and who is really benefiting? On the other hand, what is interesting about this is also intellectual property theft or trade secret infringements do not necessarily have to be a crime. And still, in general, before the Economic Espionage Act,

and even after a lot of these cases are being litigated in civil suits where the companies or the universities or just individuals themselves would bear the legal cost and take the resources to argue for their own profits or rights or whatnot. However, in particular, when it has a geopolitical context between the US and China, and we see a lot of these cases become criminalized, and it's in effect like the federal government, it's public resources being used to pursue certain ends that may only be like a private company's benefit. Capitalism is, by construct, deterritorializing, so capital can flow. Several years ago, the U.S. government launched this multi-year investigation over a Chinese-born corn thief in Iowa because he was

stealing proprietary information of this gene-edited corn seed from Monsanto. because he was stealing proprietary information of this gene edited corn seed from Monsanto. And he was indeed guilty that he did steal the corn seeds on behalf of his Chinese employer. And there was like spy planes over cornfields in Iowa and a FISA warrant and all these things. But in the end, this guy was found guilty and was sentenced to prison. And because he's actually not a U.S. citizen. So he's subject to deportation and everything. But on the other hand, Monsanto was later acquired by the German company Bayer. And so the U.S. government devoted so much federal resources to pursue an end to something that one can argue may not be American at all. And even if the company remains, quote unquote, American, who is actually benefiting from

this action? I think these are some of the more fundamental questions that needs to be asked when a lot of the current discourse seems to be constrained to just like procedural compliance or the specific, the technicalities of the legality itself. Yeah, it makes me think about how like sovereign wealth funds and Saudi Arabia and places like that invest so much in aspects of Western economies, but then we criticize other states and we don't like them to be involved. But there are these other actors that just because we consider them Western allies, then

it's okay for them to be involved, even though on a political level, there are very similar criticisms kind of leveled at them around human rights and whatnot, regardless of what is actually going on there. But I wanted to pivot a little bit. I wanted to make one note that I forgot to make earlier. And that is just to say that, you know, we were talking about Operation Paperclip and the US kind of taking scientists from Nazi Germany. But I think it's important to note that it wasn't just the United States doing that. The Soviet Union was as well. Other Western powers were. Yeah, Britain and France. Exactly. Just to be very clear that it's not just the United States doing these things. Any of the major powers are trying to increase the kind of skill or kind of technological knowledge that

they have, especially when they're in those moments of kind of more clear kind of multipolar competition, as it was at that point, and as we seem to be moving into at this moment. But in one of your pieces, you also talked about how nationalism moving into science also has effects on the type of things that, you know, science pursues, and these ideas that countries or states own particular people own particular people, own particular expertise, own particular technologies, as we're talking about with intellectual property, also has impacts on, you know, the type of work that is done, how science is perceived. Can you talk to us a bit about the impacts of that and the potential drawbacks when this kind of nationalist rhetoric is so pervasive within the scientific community.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was really interesting since earlier you mentioned how the U.S. government treats the same behavior from other countries differently depending on its own geopolitical objectives and whether that country is considered an ally or an adversary is very explicitly part of the risk assessment metric by some U.S. funding agencies and government entities in terms of governing scientific collaboration. So this is as like the evolution of the China initiative, rather than giving this kind of prosecutorial approach to streamline some disclosure requirements. And transparency is a good thing, but some of these requirements also have a very explicit geopolitical aim in it in terms of collaboration with an ally versus

collaboration with an adversary have different risk scores. But then that is subjecting academic research to the whims of geopolitics. And so what I've found, I guess it was probably the most worrying to me, is not necessarily how much collaboration takes place between these two countries per se. And I think sometimes when a conversation is so focused on, oh, is this good for science or is this good for collaboration, there is an underlying assumption that science is by default good or desirable, and collaboration is by default good and desirable. And I do not think it is the case, right? The Chinese government, of course, has been using a lot of technologies for human rights abuses, for state surveillance, and for U.S. entities to collaborate on these, they are also complicit. But what is important is that ethical or moral objection is based on the use of that technology. It's not based on the users. And what I've seen a lot of the discourse has become is, oh, China is doing this, so that is bad, because China is bad.

And if we, as in the United States or the West, do the same thing, that is not only good, but often framed as necessary because China is doing similar things. And that just becomes like, it's incredibly intellectually lazy and logically inconsistent. And at the end of the day, it's morally indefensible. And I think some of that also tied to what I talked about in my latest piece that you mentioned at the beginning, and thank you so much for reading it and sharing it, is the ethnicization of the idea of espionage. And that has its roots in this centuries-old Orientalism. And that comes back to what I was just saying about how conversations about science and technology

fragments or fractures at the border of China a lot of times. When here, like in the US context, there is a lot of vibrant discussions and debates, including on your show about the other risks and harms of emerging technologies. And there seems to be at least a lot of people are pretty clear-eyed about this. But somehow China becomes this exceptionalized space that is either, well, the Chinese government is authoritarian, Xi Jinping is a dictator, so whatever is going to happen is going to happen in China. Or it's like whether China already has this technology or is already able to build this panopticon, or China is still primitive and needs to steal these technologies for its own ends and such. And I think it is

really harmful for not just understanding what China is, but in understanding the actual nature of the development of science and technology, that a lot of the harms are not a product of and is not exclusive to any specific political system or governing ideology. And also the harms and risks of it cannot be contained by political borders. And so if China with its size and its weight, if it's not exceptionalized and being seen as this externalized other that can be separated from the rest of the world, but it's actually recognized for what it is, that is integral part of the world, including of global capitalism and the overall development of science and technology, then actually people, even if they only care about what is happening

in the U.S., can gain a much better understanding of how these technologies are actually being developed, what are the harms and benefits, and what are the different layers of complexities with regards to the development of science technology. Yeah, this is such a key point and one that I want to drill down on a little bit more. One of the things that you wrote in your pieces that you just stated there that I found really interesting is how China can both be presented as kind of technologically backward, but then at the same time be presented as like technologically advanced and we need to stop its kind of continued rise face is that when we have these really kind of propagandized narratives about China and Chinese technology, as you say, it doesn't allow us to actually be able to understand what is actually happening in China and the actual

capabilities that are at work there. And also then to understand what is happening in the United States and what U.S. tech companies and kind of their collaboration with the US government is actually producing, right? Because instead, we get these narratives that are shaped by US national security interests and kind of economic interests that are, you know, China is bad and China is trying to like take us down and anything that they do with technology is something that we should be scared of. Whereas if the United States does something, as you were saying, then it's good and it's okay and we shouldn't be very worried about it. And that to me is a serious problem. Obviously,

I'm not an American, I'm a Canadian, but I think even Americans should be concerned about that, right? Because it opens the door to just being able to dismiss any Chinese technology as bad and any American technology as good, which works very well for the large American tech companies. Whereas you explain that the problems with Chinese technology are not communism, right? Or not necessarily the CCP, but because they are developed under this capitalist framework, that many other technologies are developed under too in the United States and other parts of the world. And that requires certain kind of business models and certain ways of developing technology that has consequences for American people, for Chinese people, and for people in other parts of the world as well.

Would you mind expanding on that a little bit more? Yeah. Oh, thank you so much. And just to follow up a quick point in terms of these self-conflicting Orientalist imagination about China and technology, one of the examples that I find just like, it's sad, but it's also amusing is with regards to where COVID came from, right? And there are two arguments. One is just like, oh, Chinese people are barbarians who eat bad soup. And so that's where COVID came from. Or Chinese people are like Dr. Fu Manchu and built COVID as a bioweapon in their secret lab. But then these are two arguments that are both in some way comforting because it becomes much easier to accept it is because of a distinct,

different type of people and their misbehave rather than accepting the reality that we as human beings, as a species, is one species among many on this planet and have our vulnerabilities. So coming back to this part of it, there's a bad segue in terms of vulnerabilities, but a lot of the U.S. part of the discourse about technologies coming from China, whether it's like Chinese ownership or built in China or various things. And the vulnerabilities are, I will put it this way, right? There are different types of vulnerabilities with regards to technology, let's say, whether it's equipment from Huawei or an app like TikTok.

The first I would say is technical. And if this hardware has a technical vulnerability, or if the code has certain vulnerabilities that makes it susceptible to hacking or to abuses, then that's a technical problem. But that has nothing to do with its ownership or its country of origin. That's a technical problem that can be assessed with technical means and can be fixed with technical means. The second type of vulnerability can be regulatory in terms of what are the rules and laws and regulations governing, say, what types of data can be collected, how they can be transmitted and used. And of course, these regulations do differ by country and their legal traditions and their governing systems. However, it's not something that is unique to the need for such regulatory protections. It's not unique to any country.

A democracy doesn't automatically come with these sets of protections for data or for other types of things. And an authoritarian society does not necessarily mean everything is open to all because it also has a complex bureaucracy with conflicting interests. And regardless, these problems cannot be resolved by only pointing fingers at one country, but it needs transnational standards. And the third type of vulnerability, which is also valid, is geopolitical. In terms of the United States, government does believe that China is a quote-unquote adversary. And so in terms of, say, critical

infrastructure, it cannot allow any type of foreign ownership. I think that is a valid position to take. But that is a position that has very broad ramifications. One can say because Huawei has very close ties with the Chinese military or the Chinese security state, that is a fair statement. So if one say Huawei equipment should not be in some of the most secured rooms in the U.S. tech firms and electronic firms also have very close ties with the U.S. security state. And that argument can be laid against itself. argument being made is in essence geopolitical, but it is being used as an excuse to evade the earlier two types of broader vulnerabilities in terms of the technical vulnerabilities or the regulatory lack. And what has happened is the only geopolitical response, which is like banning Chinese stuff, becomes the only response that has taken out the discourse space to actually address the technical and the regulatory aspects of it. Yeah, I think it's a really important point to make,

right? Especially when you consider like the United States and many of its companies have similar vulnerabilities and problems as, you know, kind of the tech companies that you'd be looking at from China, but we're expected not to be concerned about those things, you know, as you say, links to the US national security state and security apparatuses, because the United States is supposed to be, you know, the good democracy country that we're all supposed to be okay with, even as we know that its companies have done, you know, a number of things that we have problems with around the world and have helped to kind of expand or encourage the expansion of American power as they have spread into other countries. And as you say, I agree with you. I think that it does make sense if the United States wants to say, you know, we don't want Huawei in critical

infrastructure. But that also brings up the question then, should American technologies be in critical infrastructure in other countries? Because does that allow them to have increased ability to surveil? Or should we all be on American platforms owned by major American companies? Because we know that the United States has connections to those companies and are able to get data from them, even though they would like us kind of to believe differently, or at least that's what it seems. And so there does seem to be a double standard here. And this is one of the problems I have, because when that double standard occurs, but we only get these geopolitical narratives that

are incredibly reductive, then we're not able to have these kind of complex conversations about the actual technologies that we rely on right now, because many of these Chinese technologies are more kind of theoretical, or the idea that kind of Chinese tech companies are going to have this power over us is much more theoretical, whereas we know that American companies already have this power. And the expectation is that we shouldn't kind of be talking about that or discussing it, or, you know, even regulating it. I totally agree. And also just like I've criticized a lot of the Chinese government's policies and behaviors. And then of course, like I'm a Chinese citizen and this is something that what I find very, very frustrating on the U.S. side is it has a lot of different arguments that

it wants to make against China. And there are things that are related to the traditional sense or how an average person might understand about national security or military strength. That is one argument. But the second is when national security has become so broadened into a concept that basically encompasses everything, in particular, it encompasses so-called economic security. And so what is being talked about in terms of national security is actually economic competition, and that the U.S. government is very, very concerned about Beijing's economic rise and such. And then the third layer is about

human rights abuses. And then again, it's not to, these are very, very valid and very, very important critiques against the Chinese government's human rights record. But what has happened in the US government's discourse or public discourse about China is human rights is being used as this kind of just like this banner being waved around when the actual arguments are being made about economic competition or about the hardened edge of military strength and other traditional sense of national security. And the end result is the human rights issues are actually not getting confronted for its own sake. And the responses do not really improve the human rights conditions in China. And what can lead to is it actually unharms civil liberties and other human rights conditions here in the U.S.

Absolutely. And, you know, we obviously see that, you know, we need to be focused on these human rights abuses wherever they're happening in the world. But the U.S. government, you know, we obviously see that, you know, we need to be focused on these human rights abuses wherever they're happening in the world. But the U.S. government, you know, very frequently uses the fact that human rights abuses are happening in countries that are not its allies to, you know, position them as being bad. But then we'll ignore similar human rights abuses in countries that it is allied with and even downplay the fact that it has its own very serious human rights abuses that are happening within its own country. And that's not to do a kind of a whataboutism and say, oh, well, we shouldn't be concerned about things that China is doing. No, we absolutely should.

But that doesn't mean that we should ignore things that are happening in the United States, in Canada as well, in places like that, because those are serious problems as well. I wanted to kind of extend this and ask you about where we see this happening in relation to various developments that have been occurring in the United States in recent years. You know, one of your pieces, you talked about the recent hearing on TikTok and kind of what that showed around the U.S. approach to Chinese technology and Chinese technology companies, and also how it's being positioned as this company that kind of spying on Americans. Meanwhile, in order to alleviate those concerns, it's creating partnerships with companies like

Oracle that have very clear connections, not just to the US security state, but have even tried to sell technology to Chinese police and things like that. Can you talk about your opinions on what you observed through that whole process? Yeah. I'm not a defender of TikTok. It is a social media platform. It is a part of surveillance capitalism, and it has a lot of problems from data security to content moderation to different things, right?

But I think what is interesting is TikTok is a company with a lot of problems. But how these problems are being portrayed or being focused on or neglected, let's say, on Capitol Hill, is very illuminating how members of the U.S. government see their own country and sees China. Because as you mentioned, right, there are these rhetorics being thrown around on one hand saying TikTok is the spy in Americans' pockets. I do not deny that TikTok as a social media platform has a poor, but not the poorest, but just like on par with other major social media platforms in terms of that it vacuums up data and has poor regulations around it. However, the solution, the proposed solution to it is not to say all social media platforms should adhere to certain data regulations. The solution is to say, oh, if TikTok stores its data, a server that is physically based in the U.S. and guarded by the U.S. company, then that's fine. So the problem really is not how much

concern is there over exploitation of data, but who gets to exploit it. And then another round of argument about TikTok, which doesn't have anything to do with data protection per se, but it's about content moderation. But it's being lumped together with regards to the spy argument is like saying TikTok is digital fentanyl that is purposefully trying to poison Americans' minds or mislead American teenagers. And I remember there is this argument being said by a member of the U.S. Congress who said something like, oh, TikTok is digital fentanyl. Well, the Chinese government has a Spanish version of TikTok that is Douyin that is on theyin as well, because it is also a social media company that wants to attract eyeballs and to extract basically time into the capital. On the other hand, the reason there are certain content that is available in the US and not

on TikTok and not on Douyin is because there is no free expression in China. And these platforms do face very, very stringent content moderations. And so the argument is really not self-consistent, that on one hand, TikTok is bad because it comes from the authoritarian government. On the other hand, TikTok is bad because there is not enough authoritarian control over it as its Chinese counterpart. I think at the end of the day, the real question is, what do we,

in general, want? If it's just to have some arbitrary metric and have the United States still be, quote-unquote, the world's richest country by some arbitrary metric. That is one objective, but that is a very narrow objective, and that is not an objective, I would say, that serves the public good. And if the objective is genuinely the health and well-being of the public, and then the public is global, then there is a very different way to see about these issues, including how we perceive the border, territorial or in other senses, and whether or not by enforcing the border actually brings real security or it actually further empowers violent organs of the state that brings more harm. A very important point. And you're talking a bit there about regulation, right? And I wanted to ask you a bit about this before we wrap up, because one thing that I think that we've seen in recent years is that there's been a lot of talk about regulation of tech companies in the United States. Little of that, I feel like, has actually been able to make it into law and actually be enforced by government.

And certainly there's been attempts by some agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission, to do antitrust measures. But a lot of those things don't seem to have gotten very far. There's obviously not kind of a national privacy act or anything like that, as you talk about in the TikTok case, where instead of saying every company needs to abide by particular data rules, they're just going after TikTok specifically. Whereas we know that in China, there has been a lot of movement toward regulation of tech companies. And obviously, there's debate as to which of those kind of initiatives are good or bad. But obviously, China, because of the structure of its government, has been able to move forward on these things in a way that is much easier in the United States. I wonder what you think about the effects of this kind of nationalist rhetoric on the ability of the United States government to regulate technology,

and also whether the Chinese government has been able to implement any regulations that potentially other governments around the world should actually be looking seriously at as something that could be helpful toward limiting the power of these companies? This is a really great question. As far as I know, I'm not the best subject area expert on the very specific aspects of the technology regulations. My own work is more on the history of science side. So I will speak on this specific part more broadly, and then I'll link it to something else.

As far as I know, for example, the Chinese government's new personal data protection law, a lot of that is actually very, very similar to GDPR in Europe. So the Chinese government is also learning from other countries and other legal developments. On the other hand, I think what is probably more important without getting into too much of the weeds of the specific regulations, including there are also some new regulations coming out of China with regards to generative AI and whatnot, is who is actually being protected and who is being empowered in this process. And what a lot of the regulations in China that the Chinese government

has proposed or enacted are not necessarily for the benefit of the Chinese public or the Chinese people. It is a way for the Chinese state to leverage power against private companies. Because when these private companies have amassed so much data, they actually have a lot of power. And they have, to an extent, may have amassed more data on Chinese individuals than the government could with its own bureaucracy and apparatus. So I think one way to look at these Chinese government regulations on tech companies is to see them as a way to discipline labor and discipline capital. And so in this process, it's not really the Chinese people are being protected, let alone being empowered.

It's really a balance between state power and the power of private capital in the Chinese political context. And so then it comes to the question of what can the U.S. government learn from these regulations? I think that, again, I don't want to dismiss overall. I think some of these regulations have benefits, and even some of these are a tug of war between the state and the private capital. Individuals can still leverage that conflicting interest to gain some limited protection on

the individual end. And I think that is actually an important feature in the Chinese system for a lot of social and civic activism. So I do want to give credit to that. On the other hand, I think on the US government side, there are certainly things to be learned from new regulations, whether it's coming out of China, coming out of Europe or other countries, including like some of these discussions are happening in the quote-unquote the developing world or the global south are actually very illuminating discussions. But on the other hand, I also do want to caution because coming to the earlier point about TikTok or a lot of these, I don't necessarily want to use the term fear-mongering, but a lot of the,

let's say, hyped up rhetoric about the capabilities of Chinese tech companies or whatnot are projections. So to a way, one might read them as an authoritarian tendency on the part of certain people in power here in the United States, whether they are government officials or whether they are tech company owners, that they wish they had that kind of power. And so they were projecting that onto this oriental plane that anything goes. So I think that is something to take note of and to be very aware of, that I do not want the regulatory process in the U.S. to become something that, to an extent, mirrors China's. Some of these policies, even like on the industrial policy front, some of that kind of like do mirror the Chinese government's policies of even like

domestic protectionism for domestic industries. I do want like to have the emphasis back to how the public, how their interests are being prioritized, how they are being actually being empowered in this process. I think that sets us up really well for a final question to end off our conversation. And I do, because I think it makes so many great points that I think lead us into something to really start to close this off, right? And that is, you know, we've talked a lot about how nationalism is fueling a lot of the narratives that we have around technology and geopolitical competition, how that affects academia, but also how that has broader effects through the economy and ultimately isn't focused on what is best for the public, but what is best for particular

governments in particular kind of corporate sectors that have the ear of government and are able to kind of use the power of the state for their interests. And so my final question is really, where do you see all this going? And who ultimately benefits from having this kind of divide and these kind of nationalist terms framed around the US and China and kind of the tech industries of both countries? This is a difficult question. And also in a sense is I myself am always very reluctant to answer questions that is predicting the future or projecting into the future. It's not just because the future is unknown, but also because

I think what is very important is that the future is not predetermined. And so there is no set path that these two countries are on that is somehow irreversible. And I think I might mention here that we are recording this on August 24th. And so in three days, the first agreement signed between the People's Republic of China and United States, the U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement that was signed in 1979 and has been renewed more or less every five years with a couple lapses over the past four and a half decades is set to lapse. And it's unclear whether it will be renewed again or when. And I think what is interesting is, as I mentioned earlier, this agreement has lapsed before, most notably in the immediate

aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. And then it was renewed again in 1991 with added intellectual poverty protection agreements. And then it was lapsed for a few months during the Trump administration, and it was renewed again, but then backdated to cover the part where it lapsed. And so if, I guess, when this podcast airs, it would most certainly have expired, but that is not the end of the road. There are certain ways to still mitigate that. And again, this is only just like, it is one umbrella agreement, and I do not want to get to the technical details of what its expiration actually means. But this is a symbolic thing, and it's not just a symbolic thing, but it has symbolic

value. What I have found quite alarming is somehow the rhetoric has coalesced around, oh, this is just another sign or another step of so-called US-China decoupling and whatnot. It seems like, oh, this is regrettable, but this is the trajectory these two superpowers are on. And that is not the case. There is no fundamental laws or forces of the universe that determines the US-China have to see each other as adversaries and have to lock themselves into this seemingly zero-sum competition. And I think what is actually very important on probably the pandemic is an example to this, right,

partly on intellectual property. Who do these intellectual property protections, these trade secrets actually protect? There is a fundamental rethinking that needs to take place with regards to the distribution and the sharing of the fruits of science and technology developments. On the other hand, there is also a much broader question that the leaders and the sharing of the fruits of science and technology developments. On the other hand, there is also a much broader question that the leaders and the people of the two countries need to reflect on is what kind of future they actually want. And I think a lot of these conversation is revolving around competition and it's just being assumed as in competition is inevitable and it is natural and it is desirable. But a competition against who, by what metric, and very importantly, to what end.

And a lot of times I myself as a Chinese citizen living in the US, in a lot of these discussions, I encounter the word we. But who are the we and what are the boundaries that is being imagined around the word we? And how is that boundary being imagined, conceived? And how is that boundary being enforced? And is it enforced by force? I think these are some of the questions that are probably going to illuminate the path that we will find ourselves on.

I think it's really important to be asking those questions, right? And every time we hear these kind of framings of what is going on between the US and China and the potential threats of US technology or Chinese technology that we think about who is actually benefiting from this and who is actually being served. And is it in the public interest to think about it in this way? Or is this just in some kind of state interest or commercial interest or national security interest that is ultimately separate from the public interest? And I think that's something that the show always tries to focus on. And that's part of the reason that we've been kind of skeptical of these narratives about

the US and China divide and needing to see the US as an unequivocal good and China as an unequivocal bad, because that simply doesn't make sense to me. It also assumes a certain clear-cut border, including US technology.S. technology or Chinese technology, including like U.S. science or Chinese science. And in my physics career, my question was always, while being a Chinese-born and raised scientist working at a U.S. institution for an European-based experiment as part of a large international collaboration, I wouldn't assign a country label to it. And the very act of assigning a label assumes a certain border. And I think these are some of the frameworks that needs to be at least challenged. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And Yang Yang, it was really great to have you on the show, to have this discussion. I'll certainly be reading your work as you continue doing it because I find it really illuminating and helps to break down some of these questions that we should be asking

about these big issues. So thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Oh, thank you so much for these really thoughtful questions. And I'll be continuing to listen to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. Yangyang Cheng is a research scholar at Yale Law School, and her writing has been published by a number of different publications. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week so we can keep having these in-depth conversations on important tech topics, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.