Amy Chew is an independent journalist based in Kuala Lumpur. She covers Southeast Asia and parts of the Middle East. She was previously based in Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. A former correspondent for Channel NewsAsia and Reuters, and she has also worked in investment banking as an analyst for Daiwa Capital Markets Singapore.
The writer Hao Qun, who publishes under the pen name Murong Xuecun, has spent the past two decades exploring Chinese society through his literature. After studying at Beijing’s prestigious China University of Politics and Law, he worked in the private sector. He began his writing career in 2002 online, writing a series on gambling, sex, and drugs in China, which he later published as his debut novel Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, the English edition of which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008. In 2010, he won China’s People’s Literature Prize, which is presented by the state-affiliated China Writer’s Association, for his non-fiction book The Missing Ingredient. His acceptance speech was a critique of censorship in the publishing industry and of his own acquiescence to it, and when he was unable to deliver it at the prize ceremony, he delivered it instead at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. In the years that followed, he faced mounting obstacles to speaking his mind in China. His Weibo account with 8.5 million followers was deleted in 2013. But he wrote frequently for The New York Times about the limits on expression in China. In 2020, Murong traveled to Wuhan and documented the lives of eight ordinary people at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. He left China in order to safely publish the resulting book, Deadly Quiet City, which was released earlier this year in the United States. He now lives in Australia.
Angeli Datt spoke with Murong at the offices of the writers’ advocacy organization PEN America in New York City.
Angeli Datt is the China research and advocacy lead at PEN America. Previously, she was a senior research analyst for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at Freedom House, where she researched censorship, media freedom, and freedom of expression issues and China’s overseas influence. Prior to joining Freedom House, Datt was the Deputy Director of Research at Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) and worked under the pseudonym Frances Eve. Datt holds double Master’s degrees in International Affairs from Peking University in Beijing and the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master’s (Hons) in Modern History from the University of St Andrews.
United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China on June 18, after repeated delays of high-level meetings and amid ongoing tensions between the two countries. In November, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Bali, where they agreed to further talks aimed at mending ties. But a planned trip by Blinken was canceled in February after the U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon over U.S. airspace, re-aggravating tensions. What are the stakes of Blinken’s trip, and what is its likely impact on the state of U.S.-China relations?
China’s technological prowess is frequently invoked by U.S. policymakers hoping to get votes, attention, or enough bipartisan support to pass a bill. Competition with China was a central motivating factor in federal legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, not to mention the work of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. “Beating China”—specifically in science and technology development—is a key driver of U.S. governance and, ahead of the 2024 presidential race, elections.
George Washington University Assistant Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Ding published a recent article that explains why measuring a state’s scientific and technological power should include not only how many innovations a country can check off, but also the degree to which new technologies are integrated into the economy and society. Ding spoke with Johanna Costigan about his new paper. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. —Johanna Costigan
Johanna Costigan: Can you explain the distinction between innovation capacity and diffusion capacity?
Jeffrey Ding: Innovation capacity refers to a state’s ability to pioneer new-to-the-world breakthroughs in science and technology. Diffusion capacity refers to a state’s ability to spread those innovations across a wide range of productive processes in an economy. I argue in my paper that we tend to gravitate toward measures of innovation and pay insufficient attention to diffusion.
How did diffusion occur in the second Industrial Revolution in the U.S., and why does that example show diffusion is an essential metric?
In the late 19th century, the U.S. was not at the forefront of science and technology—our best and brightest went to Germany to study. Even though other nations were leading the way in fields like chemical engineering, the U.S. was much stronger in terms of diffusion capacity; it was better at applying those uses across a wide range of processes. If you only looked at which countries were winning the most Nobel Prizes or had the most advanced research institutes, you would be underestimating the scientific and technological prowess of the U.S.
Assessments that are more oriented around diffusion capacity would have predicted the U.S. to sustain its economic rise and become the preeminent economic power. Back then, there wasn’t a global innovation index, but the case study was to go back and see if we rank different countries based on this, only using the innovation indicators provides an incorrect view. Diffusion is central to a state’s ability to convert science and technology into economic strength.
You write that academic research in the U.S. was more closely tied to commerce than it was in Europe, which allowed American breakthroughs to spread more rapidly. Given the close relationship between government and industry in the PRC, why might that not be the case in contemporary China?
The government acts as a bottleneck within China’s scitech ecosystem, stifling organic industry-university collaborations. A lot of the research happens at government institutions as opposed to corporate-sponsored R&D [research and development]. The channels between universities and industry are not as robust, so some of that has to do with surrounding legal regimes and whether university research can be translated into a startup company. Unlike China, the U.S. has a really good set of legal rules that enable that to happen.
But Chinese companies are trying to address this; more AI companies, for example, are trying to set up labs in universities to foster that. But if you look at co-authorship rates in publications on AI (papers that have at least one author from a university and one from industry), those rates are very low in China compared to countries in Europe and the U.S. A lot of the story here is just the vestiges of central planning that are still in China’s scitech ecosystem and that just don’t foster the organic fast-acting processing that is required for diffusion.
How would you characterize American assessments of China’s science and technology power? What’s missing?
The consensus significantly overstates China’s scitech capability. One recent example from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which while it is not American has been used to justify more extreme China policy, says China is leading the U.S. in 37 of 44 considered technologies, all of which were focused on innovation. (I don’t even think that conclusion is accurate based just on innovation.) It reflects the United States’ obsession with innovation capacity when it comes to assessing scitech power. Even if you go back and review Biden’s first remarks to Congress, he argued that China is closing in quickly and that it’s a race to see who can dominate new innovations in these technologies.
The contribution of my paper is partly to argue that assumptions about innovation shape the perception that China is improving rapidly and has already taken over the U.S. in some critical technologies. Reorienting ourselves to a diffusion-centric framework is an important first step to having a more balanced understanding of what’s happening in China’s scitech ecosystem.
Members of the Biden administration like Jake Sullivan have described moves like export controls aimed at China as “narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance.” What do you think of that depiction, and how do judgments of relative military strength fit into the diffusion/innovation breakdown?
When it comes to competition with China over military AI applications, I think the Biden administration’s approach is overly preoccupied with maintaining a lead in innovation capacity. Their theory of victory, in my view, seems to be all about preventing China from building the biggest and baddest autonomous weapon, trained on the largest amount of data using the most amount of computing power. If the history of military electrification is a useful guide for how AI will affect the military balance of power, as I argue in a recent article, then AI’s most substantial impact on military power will take decades as advances diffuse across a broad range of applications in logistics, decryption, targeting, and intelligence. Ensuring that the military is able to tap into a broad base of AI engineering talent is a more effective route to ensuring that AI’s effect on the military balance will favor the U.S.
You write: “A rebalanced evaluation of China’s potential for S&T leadership requires looking beyond multinational corporations like Huawei, first-tier cities like Beijing, and flashy R&D numbers to the humble undertaking of diffusion.” Why do you think such limited analyses are tempting? Why are they dangerous?
Firstly, it’s just a lot harder to get diffusion capacity indicators. Many metrics of innovation, like government R&D funding indicators, patent rates, and publication numbers are all tracked, whereas it takes more work to get indicators of diffusion capacity. Finding systematic and reliable numbers of diffusion capacity is crucial.
And misleading assessments carry a few dangers. Having an accurate sense of where you stand provides a solid foundation for science and technology policy. There is something to be said about having a true—or truer—understanding of the world. Additionally, overestimating China’s scitech capabilities may lead the U.S. to engage in more reckless policies and provide more momentum for containment-type measures that backfire on both sides. It could lead to the mentality we saw in the Cold War where the U.S. was concerned about the missile gap with the Soviet Union that turned out to be illusory and resulted in wasted expenditures, spiraling fears, and an arms race that put the two superpowers on a path toward conflict.
There are people in the U.S. government who probably agree with me in that a lot of assessments on China’s tech development are overhyped, but they think it’s necessary to pump up China’s prowess in order to motivate certain policies. But that could easily backfire and is a dangerous precedent to set. While that justification might in some cases be used to make sound decisions, in other cases it could be used to enact dangerous policies.
The Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989 was a turning point for China. Weeks of student-led demonstrations turned into the largest protest for political reform in the history of the People’s Republic. The bloody military crackdown that crushed the movement on the night of June 3-4, 1989, had far-reaching consequences, not only for China’s development, but for its relations with the rest of the world.
One reason was that Tiananmen Square was also a watershed moment in the history of the media. It generated unparalleled international coverage and became a defining moment in the Information Age: the first time a popular uprising in an authoritarian state was broadcast live across the globe. The images from that time—the Goddess of Democracy, the man in front of the tank—became enduring symbols of popular resistance to injustice. The coverage of Tiananmen redefined the relationship between the press, public opinion, and foreign policymaking and continues to influence both Chinese politics and international perceptions of China to this day.
I was CNN’s Beijing bureau chief in 1989. My new book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, is based on interviews with more than 100 journalists who have covered China from 1945 to the present day. The excerpt below includes stories from reporters who covered the protests and bloodshed in Beijing in the spring of 1989.
The People’s Liberation Army assault began on the western side of Chang An Avenue. John Pomfret of the AP and Scott Savitt of UPI were watching at the Muxudi intersection.
John Pomfret, Associated Press: The military began to fire. I saw people falling.
Scott Savitt, United Press International: I can hear it right in my mind like I am reliving it—“ pa pa pa pa pa.” And those are AK-47 [rifles] firing on semiautomatic.
On the balcony of CNN’s room at the Beijing Hotel, I had a clear view a few hundred meters down Chang An to the north end of the Square. We managed to keep a phone line open to CNN headquarters in Atlanta. I could see red tracer bullets, and hear the occasional crackle of gunfire, as I broadcast live, telling viewers, “The assault on Tiananmen Square is now underway.”
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times: I hopped on my bicycle and hurtled toward Tiananmen. You could hear the gunfire and the crowds were rushing the other way. And I keep thinking this is a crazy job where there’s gunfire, everyone in their right mind is going the other way, and you’re going towards it.
Melinda Liu, Newsweek: The bullets are so close that you not only hear the percussion of the shot, you hear the “zing.” I could see people being shot, bloody bodies being put onto these three-wheel ambulance things, people shouting all kinds of stuff at soldiers, and just total fear and chaos.
Cynde Strand, CNN: Bullets would fly past us and you’d hear crying and screaming. There were moments of fear. There were moments of—what the hell are we doing here? But this is what you are a journalist for. This is right where we need to be. We are witnessing history. This is what makes a difference. There is no record unless you are standing there.
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times: I was pretty scared. On the Square itself, I tried to keep a layer of people between me and the troops, but I remember realizing that I was a few inches taller than most of the Chinese, so it was a pretty critical part of my real estate that was exposed. There were people in the crowd who were getting shot. My notebook from that evening was damp with sweat just from fear. I ran to the Xiehe Hospital. There were lots of bloody people in the hallways and everywhere. One of the ambulance drivers showed me bullet holes in his ambulance. One of the things that shook me was a young man, roughly my age, who had been shot in the back and who was fighting for his life. He hadn’t done anything riskier than I had. His luck has just run out.
Jim Laurie, ABC News: We were never able to determine the extent of the deaths and injuries that night. All we knew was that there were tremendous numbers and that the hospitals were in a panic mode. My view is that whether it was a hundred or a thousand, it was incredibly devastating, not only for the people who were killed, but for the reputation of China.
While all of this was happening, I continued my live reporting. At mid-afternoon Washington time—around 2:00 a.m. in Beijing—Secretary of State James Baker appeared on CNN, having been previously scheduled for a weekend talk show. I did a quick phone update, talking about seeing bullets and bodies, and then host Charles Bierbauer turned to Baker and said, “Mr. Secretary, does the U.S. government now take a stronger demarche against the Chinese government?”
James Baker, Secretary of State: It caught me by surprise. I was on the air as it began to happen. I was very much caught on the spot. I do remember vividly thinking to myself, “How do I handle this one?” I remember being caught flat-footed.
Bernard Shaw, CNN: I think you could say that was the beginning of the “CNN effect,” whereby time is truncated, and reactions and decisions are made based on events as they’re happening in real time, which puts a lot of pressure on foreign capitals.
John Pomfret, Associated Press: I stayed in the center of the Square with the remaining students until they conducted their negotiations with the military, and I walked out with them. You were involved with the simple logistics of doing your job. But it was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had in my life.
Cynde Strand, CNN: We came off the Square with them. Some were dejected, crying. But some of them were still singing. Then there was the dilemma. We’ve got great tape. How are we going to get it back? This old man in a Mao jacket was driving one of those bicycles with a flat panel. He let us lay on that, and the students gave us blankets, and we covered everything over us, and he rode us back to the Beijing hotel.
The next morning, Monday June 5, AP photographer Jeff Widener was on the balcony of a room at the Beijing Hotel.
Jeff Widener, Associated Press: I see this long column of tanks, and I’m thinking, “Well, that’s not a bad picture. I’ve got a long lens. It’ll be a nice compression shot.” And then this guy with shopping bags walks out. I’m just waiting for him to get shot, but It’s too far away. I look back at the bed, and I had a lens doubler, which would make my 400 an 800. Do I gamble? Do I go back to the bed? Maybe I lose the shot, or do I just shoot this wider? So I took a chance. I ran to the bed, got it, put it on the camera, open the aperture up all the way. One, two, three shots. Then it was over. Some people came, grabbed this guy, and they ran off. I took the film and asked a foreign student if he could smuggle it in his underwear back to the AP office.
Liu Heung-shing, Associated Press: Another 45 minutes passed. An American guy with a ponytail and a backpack showed up with an AP envelope. Our Japanese photographer soaked the film. I looked at that frame—and that’s the frame. It went out.
John Sheahan, CBS News: No one who has ever seen that is going to forget that picture.
Jeff Widener, Associated Press: For a lot of people, this guy represents everything in our lives that we’re battling, because we’re all battling something. We still don’t know who this guy is. It’s almost appropriate because it’s almost like the Unknown Soldier. He’s really become a symbol for a lot of people. For me, it was just another assignment. It didn’t sink in till later that I had something really big.
