The Trump administration has drawn a clear line in the sand that the outright theft and coercive tactics China has employed to gain access to and control over our intellectual property won’t be tolerated any longer. The decision to impose tough sanctions on China is long overdue. America’s economic and national security interests are at stake.
Intellectual property is the fundamental building block of both economic and military strength. America remains the leading innovator in the world. But China has made clear through public documents that it not only wants to lead the world in the industries of the future, but it intends to be essentially self-sufficient in those sectors. From robotics to artificial intelligence to autonomous vehicles to quantum computing, China is actively seeking a dominant position.
That is its right, provided that it remains within the rules that China has agreed to and that it expects others to follow. But it hasn’t. The Chinese regime has repeatedly violated international trade laws and norms. The cost of China’s intellectual property theft alone been well documented by entities ranging from the US International Trade Commission to the bipartisan Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property. As Congressionally-appointed commissioners on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, we have heard testimony year after year from numerous witnesses from a variety of economic sectors about the problems they face. In addition to the outright cybertheft of their most valuable intellectual property, they have faced other attacks on their company’s technology.
Published in Daily Times, April 2nd 2018.