【英文】美国智库报告：美中科技战与数字国家的实践（135页）

英文研究报告 2021年08月30日 07:13 管理员

What was the underlying dynamic for the Trump administration of the United States (U.S.) to launch the trade war with China from 2018? To answer this question, this introductory chapter will examine the following issues: (1) the U.S.-Japan trade war in the 1980s and 1990s, (2) how the U.S.-China trade war spilled over to such international arena as the World Trade Organization (WTO), (3) Trump’s apparent rationale to close the U.S. trade defcit, and (4) how the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) exposed the U.S. biotechnological under-capacity. I will argue that, beneath the U.S.-China trade war, the technology competition between the two powers is actually the more deep-seated structural source of their ongoing unsettling rivalry.

Former President Donald Trump (2017–2021) launched a series of trade wars against the American allies and other countries, including Canada, the European Union (E.U.), Japan, India, Taiwan and Turkey. In particular, Trump’s trade war with China starting from April 2018 caught wide global attention because the U.S. and China were the two largest economies in the world. Apart from levying additional American tarifs on Chinese goods, Trump cited national security concerns and banned the Chinese technology giant Huawei’s 5G technologies and urged the allies to follow the ban.

He also banned the popular Chinese social media apps, WeChat and TikTok. Trump’s moves, however, spurred a public debate in China on whether China should seek to decouple from the U.S. in the long term.1 Therefore, by the end of 2020, the Chinese government formally announced their long-term plan to achieve technology independence.