INSTEAD of building a level playing field as it advocates, the United States is more willing to resort to foul play to keep its tech supremacy. Chen Gang, a prestigious scientist at MIT, is the latest collateral damage. He had a grueling long year after being arrested in January 2021 for allegedly concealing China affiliations. Last month, U.S. prosecutors dropped Chen’s case. Chen’s story is only part of the United States’ terribly misguided initiative that brought the McCarthyist mania to a field of knowledge where exchange and sharing are normally dearly cherished. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice scrapped the initiative that put Chen into custody, amid strong domestic objections. “The failure of the China Initiative to produce any results shows the serious flaws in the reasoning behind it,” H. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, wrote in an editorial published Thursday. However, the country’s impetus to contain China’s tech, with the sleight of hand, has not lost steam. With a slew of allegations, sanctions and blacklisting, Washington seems unwilling to win a tech battle with its close competitor through fair play. To “make you worse” rather than striving for excellence is its tactic. For a time, trade secret theft was a frequently-used false allegation against China. But according to a cyber-security report published Wednesday by the Beijing-based Qi An Pangu lab, a hacking group affiliated with the U.S. National Security Agency has conducted cyber-attacks against Chinese communications, scientific research departments and economic sectors for more than a decade. On the other hand, China’s patent applications were 2.5 times as many as that of the U.S. in 2020, as shown by WIPO data, making the espionage charges increasingly unconvincing. There is no shortage of evidence that the U.S. tech policies toward China are often aimed at containing the latter’s development. On Feb. 8, one day after the Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group rolled out China’s first lithographic machine for chipset packaging, the U.S. Government added the company to its Unverified List, citing its inability “to establish the bona fides” of the company. The U.S. Government also used a double standard when it came to supportive tech plans. China’s drive to bolster its advanced manufacturing has been ruthlessly flayed. However, the United States has also rolled out a barrage of its own frontier tech aid programs. Those programs boiled down to a huge sum of subsidies for sectors such as 6G, quantum tech, semiconductors, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. To cover up its unsportsmanlike practices, Washington made excuses of fabricated national security concerns, poorly-grounded human rights abuses and even far-fetched ones like China’s scheme to collect American people’s gene data. What made the United States a tech powerhouse after World War II was not the Cold War mentality, but an open, inclusive and collaborative system that fostered innovation — an architecture China is keen to emulate but the U.S. is setting aside. Washington is good at imagining an enemy but weak in solving its own problems. While ringing a loud warning of China’s 5G threat, the U.S. administration got bogged down in the spectrum allocation within its own country for the next-generation wireless technology. The country’s two political parties are divided over multiple issues to renovate its tech infrastructure, especially in the year of its mid-term elections. But seeing China as an enemy turns out to be one of the few things that they agree on. It benefits none because they’re doing this at a time when international scientific collaboration is urgently needed to address humanity’s existential threats, such as COVID-19 and global warming.(Xinhua) | 