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Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930 protects against international infringement of domestic intellectual property rights, including patent rights, 5 copyrights,6 trademarks, 7 and semiconductor chip mask work.8 Section 337 creates a separate channel of relief from intellectual property infringement under the auspices of the ITC, which is distinct from the federal courts. The ITC may grant a cease-and-desist order,9 a limited exclusion order directed against named respondents,' 0 or a general exclusion order which is enforceable at the border against any person." This procedure contrasts with the U.S. federal district court procedures for patent infringement. Title 35 of the United States Code sets forth the federal remedy available to intellectual property owners against infringement. 12 The remedies available to a patent owner in a Title 35 action, upon a finding of infringement, include injunctive relief and compensatory damages no less than a reasonable royalty.' 3 The court in a Title 35 action may also, at its discretion, award treble damages. 14 The federal courts, however, cannot order extraordinary injunctive relief such as general in rem exclusion orders; damages in a federal court action are limited to money damages and/or injunctive relief.15 The basic inefficiency of the federal courts is one reason why Section 337 exists and why domestic concerns still strongly support it. In contrast to Section 337 investigations before the ITC, the federal court system is harder to access, 16 slower, 17 and less likely to provide significant relief to domestic producers whose goal is to exclude all infringing products from the U.S. market.'

If you follow the news, you know that tensions between the United States and China are high and that the commercial relationship between the two biggest trading nations on the planet has been fraying. Yet, amid the ominous headlines about a possible “decoupling” of the United States and China, you may be surprised by how strong and binding their financial ties remain. Many big U.S. companies depend on China for a substantial part of their income and rely on Chinese suppliers and factories for their products. The two economies are closely linked, and, as an old China hand, I think that’s a good thing. It implies that even if relations deteriorate further, the countries have many incentives for pulling back from the brink of serious conflict. Consider that while the publicly traded U.S. companies in the S&P 500 obtain almost 60 percent of their revenue domestically, the biggest source of their foreign sales is China. That’s according to estimates from the financial data company FactSet, which said sales from China amounted to 7.1 percent of S&P 500 revenues for the 12 months through December. The second-largest foreign source was Japan, with 2.6 percent; followed by Germany and Britain, with 2.2 percent each; and then Taiwan, with 1.8 percent. Numbers like these are critical in assessing U.S.-China relations, Dale Copeland, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, said in an interview. “Expectations of future profits are a key and often neglected factor in international relations,” he said. Mr. Copeland is the author of “A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy From the Revolution to the Rise of China.” “History shows that when a major power cuts off business and resources abruptly — so that prospects for future commerce look dim — the possibility of war becomes much greater,” he added. “Fortunately, that hasn’t happened so far with the United States and China. Greater conflict, even war — aren’t inevitable. There are still plenty of opportunities for future business and, I think, that is, and should be, a deliberate part of current U.S. policy.” The Case Against China Corporate earnings provide only one perspective on a complex issue. But they are eye-opening because they seem to fly in the face of the drumroll of conflicts and restrictions between the United States and China. From tariffs to technology bans to concerns about TikTok, the Biden administration has been cracking down on China, which, it says, is abusing longstanding commercial relationships, subsidizing local industries directly and indirectly, obtaining U.S. intellectual property illicitly and fundamentally threatening U.S. national security. U.S. intelligence estimated that China had “the capability to directly compete with the United States and U.S. allies” and, if unopposed, could “alter the rules-based global order” in its favor. It’s an election year in the United States and the country’s new China policies build on a shift that began during the Trump administration. Donald J. Trump’s advisers now say that if he is re-elected, he will aim for a full “decoupling” from China, though he has been inconsistent: He recently questioned the need to require the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the app or shut it down in the United States, but as president, he tried to force a sale. China’s reaction to recent U.S. measures has been muted. But some further response is more likely if the United States keeps pushing for an allied commercial front that aims to prevent Chinese factories from exporting torrents of low-cost goods like electric vehicles, solar panels and steel that could hurt local industries and cause domestic dislocations in many countries. Porous Barriers The steepest targeted tariffs — like the new 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles — are on goods that aren’t being imported in large volumes into the United States. That means that President Biden’s new tariffs wouldn’t change the overall picture much, an analysis by Oxford Economics, an independent research firm, suggested. The trade-weighted average U.S. tariff on goods from all nations was just “1.6 percent before the Trump trade wars and it rose to as much as 3.1 percent,” Ryan Sweet, the chief U.S. economist at the firm, said in an email. Before Mr. Biden’s latest tariffs, the average U.S. tariff was 2.7 percent, he said, and the new tariffs would “permanently add 0.14 percent to the effective tariff rate.” But the effective tariff will drop below 2.3 percent over the next decade, he projected, as businesses figure out ways of avoiding “the Trump/Biden tariff hikes.” That assumes the tariff wars don’t worsen. To put that into perspective, the World Bank calculated that the worldwide average tariff was 2.6 percent in 2017, before the U.S.-China conflict began. So the United States is still not a global outlier, even if it is no longer reducing trade barriers and lowering costs for consumers. At this point, as U.S. corporate earnings reports show, there are still vast opportunities for profitable commerce between the two countries. The Chip Wars What I find striking is that even companies that design, manufacture and create tools for advanced silicon chips continue to receive substantial revenues from China. Recall that in 2022, the United States began to impose export controls on such companies from countries that used U.S. technology, restricting their sales to China. At the same time, with the Chips Act, the United States began subsidizing construction of domestic semiconductor foundries, effectively replicating parallel efforts that China had begun earlier. I spoke with Chris Miller, a historian at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who wrote “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.” U.S. restrictions are calibrated so that even some advanced chips are being shipped to China, he said. “It’s the chips that are critical for A.I. that the U.S. is really targeting. Others are getting through.” Nvidia, the foremost designer of the chips that make artificial intelligence possible, is prohibited from shipping its most advanced products to China. That has dented its business there. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, said in an earnings call this past week that Nvidia’s business in China had declined “because of the limitations on our technology.” For 2023, FactSet estimated that China was Nvidia’s third-biggest market, with 16.6 percent of its total sales, behind only the United States, with 44.3 percent, and Taiwan, with 22 percent. In fact, all of the semiconductor companies I looked at — Nvidia, Broadcom, AMD, Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung, Lam Research, KLA and Tokyo Electronics — received substantial revenue from China in 2023. China was among the companies’ top three markets, and, in most cases, ranked No. 1. Intel, for example, received 26.8 percent of its revenue from China. The case of ASML, a Dutch company, is instructive. The company makes lithography machines that are needed to etch circuits for the smallest and most cutting-edge chips. Roger Dassen, the company’s chief financial officer, said in an earnings call in April that the U.S. ban could eliminate 10 to 15 percent of its China sales. Nonetheless, he said, “We’re still looking at a strong sales level for China for this year.” FactSet estimated that ASML received 25.8 percent of its revenues from China in 2023. Revenue from the United States was only 11.4 percent. Consider Apple. It’s not just that China accounted for 17.8 percent of the company’s revenue in 2023, second only to the United States. It’s that Apple routinely ships large quantities of tiny, advanced, state-of-the-art semiconductors in and out of China. “The regulations were written to allow this to happen,” Mr. Miller said. The iPhone 15 in my pocket contains a four-nanometer chip designed by Apple in California, made in Taiwan, shipped to China for assembly and then shipped back to consumers like me in New York. The iPhone 15 Pro already uses three-nanometer chips, and Apple is preparing to incorporate even more advanced two-nanometer chips from Taiwan Semiconductor. All this technology is beyond China’s commercial capability. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. This past week, China conducted military exercises in the waters around Taiwan, issuing a “stern warning” against moves toward the island’s independence. China was also demonstrating that it could cut off access to the advanced silicon chips that have become the jet fuel for the world’s stock markets. The peak of globalization may have passed, but peaks come and go. Long-term trends are what matter. It’s in everyone’s interest that the United States and China coexist peacefully. In their search for profit, the world’s businesses are still finding ways to make that happen.

Betting against a U.S.-China decoupling requires increasingly long-shot optimism. Looking at the relationship from the U.S. side, such optimism is hard to justify. Looking at the relationship from the Chinese side, there is only marginally more room for it. And even as pessimism mounts bilaterally, China’s economic prospects are dimming. The relationship between the U.S. and China has changed rapidly over the last half-century. For most of this period, the prevailing interpretation was constructive engagement: America benefitted from this relationship geopolitically and economically by bringing China into the Western system. No more. More recently a reappraisal questioning America’s benefits from its relationship with China has been underway. This reappraisal’s two schools of thought — decoupling and derisking — agree retrenchment is needed. Their chief disagreement is not over “if?” but “how much?” Derisking focuses on denying China strategic assets and reducing America’s dependence on China for our strategic assets. Decoupling argues that America and the West must go further still, to virtually withdraw from meaningful economic cooperation across the board. While sharing the principle of reduction, both schools may also share the misapprehension that control over the relationship is possible. Succinctly, has decoupling already begun on both sides of the U.S.-China relationship? Betting against decoupling is difficult from the U.S. perspective. The American people have a strongly negative view of China’s government. As a result, there is strong bipartisan opposition to China, the only contention being over which party can take a tougher stance against the Chinese Communist Party’s policies. Reasons for America’s across-the-board disapproval of the Chinese government are broad and deep, ranging from human rights abuses, environmental damage, intellectual property theft, espionage, military aggression, trade abuses abroad and bad business practices at home, an increasingly communist ideological bent to its government and threats to U.S. and Western military security. If anything, China has stoked these issues recently so that the list continues to grow. Its growth and severity make it almost impossible to see Americans’ perception of China improving over the next few years. Betting against decoupling has only marginally better odds from the Chinese perspective. Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party have become unmistakably more authoritarian in recent years. This increased personal and state control has made China more belligerent at home and abroad. At any crossroads of world opinion and Xi’s, there is no longer any question of which way prevails. With the course apparently now set under Xi, the question becomes one of a post-Xi China. There are three basic outcomes: China continues Xi’s harder line, takes an even tougher stance or moves away from today’s Xi position. Only the first two seem currently possible because Xi’s control allows him to stack the bureaucracy that will continue in power after him. For those in the West looking for someone to play the conciliatory role Deng Xiaoping played decades ago, the question is not simply who could do so, but how long the wait for such a person will be? It is also worth remembering that Deng was an exceptional leader who masterfully (and miraculously) navigated China’s dangerous internal politics. Just because such a figure is again needed is no guarantee such a person can again emerge. Not long ago, China’s mammoth and seemingly invincible economy provided ample reason for many to sweep concerns about the one-sided relationship between China and the West under the rug. No longer. No more the juggernaut, China’s economy looks increasingly vulnerable and its vulnerability is increasingly visible. And, in what appears to be a vicious cycle, economic weaknesses prompt the CCP to respond with political strength — not the needed economic reforms that would aid the economy over the long term. Such actions undermine the economy and increase the price of future fixes; they also enhance friction with the West and diminish China as a desirable place to do business. Not surprisingly, U.S. and Western investments are shifting from China because as China’s risk rises, its return is dropping. Added to this cavalcade of caveats is the unknown; a chance event that could plunge relations decidedly deeper at a moment’s notice: one of China’s many shows of strength going awry, another spy balloon miscue, a revelation that China’s role in the COVID pandemic was worse than already known or a blatant act of aggression. China has been known as a bad actor for some time. Now the company it keeps internationally underscores it — North Korea, Iran, Russia, Cuba — and signals its deliberate separation from the West. Simultaneously, it is becoming an increasingly bad return and a worse risk. If not already underway, will decoupling occur — regardless of any U.S. political debate to determine it?

We remain opposed to any effort at outright decoupling of the US-China relationship. The costs of decoupling from losing trade and foreign investment benefits for both countries would be significant and unlikely to generate clear winners. We respect the legitimate needs of both countries to define and protect their national security and law enforcement interests and urge them to do so in ways that leave space for commercially-focused engagement to take place and in close consultation with the business community.132 The geographic scope and institutional diversity of backlash against China and Chinese firms is better explained in terms of security dilemma dynamics than manifestations of vested interests.

Conclusion

Last week, the Washington Times reported that the United States had begun to conduct cyber operations against China in response to largescale cyber-enabled intellectual property (IP) theft. These operations reportedly included U.S. cyber-enabled theft of information about Chinese military technology—in other words, giving the adversary a taste of its own medicine. They follow a December 2018 Department of Justice indictment of several members of a Chinese cyber threat actor group, dubbed APT 10, for intellectual property theft, as well as similar indictments in October for theft of aviation trade secrets. If reports about the recent cyber operation are accurate, it would represent a significant departure from the U.S. approach to this behavior thus far, which had focused on a “name and shame” strategy through leveraging legal and diplomatic instruments of power. This new, more robust strategy to address IP theft likely reflects the reality that legal and diplomatic measures alone, while generating some positive outcomes, have failed to stem the tide of cyber-enabled IP theft. This is concerning because rampant Chinese IP theft related to “grey area” industries such as aviation and aerospace, as well as other industries that develop and produce U.S. military weapons systems, threatens to reshape the overall distribution of conventional military power between the U.S. and its strategic competitors. The United States clearly recognizes that it can do more to counter IP theft of national security assets. However, any program to counter IP theft must achieve a difficult balance. On one hand, it must impose direct and indirect costs on perpetrators of IP theft that outweigh the benefits. At the same time, it must avoid self-defeating economic effects (for instance, trade wars) and clearly signal the intent behind policy actions so they are not mistaken as precursors to war. It is clear that the legal and diplomatic approach to cost-imposition, which is limited to inflicting discrete costs on indicted individuals and more diffuse reputational costs on governments that sponsor such activity, has not produced an appreciable change in behavior. This begs the question: Is a U.S. strategy of responding to cyber-enabled national security IP theft through offensive cyber operations that include theft of adversary IP the right way to generate costs and change behavior? We argue that this is problematic for two reasons. First, it undermines U.S. efforts to develop norms against cyber-enabled IP theft. The United States has a comparative advantage in innovation and should not take steps that could further erode protections of it. Second, this approach will not be sufficiently costly in practice to alter adversary behavior. The reality is that the United States is unlikely to devote the scale of manpower and resources to cyber-enabled adversary IP theft campaigns to generate meaningful costs against their targets. Rather, we recommend a program of deepening public-private collaboration between the Defense Department (DoD) and the defense industry, which balances the objective of imposing costs on adversaries with the risks of escalation. Private entities like Boeing and Lockheed Martin typically have a deep understanding of the threat environment and threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) because they own and operate the networks and systems that threat actors target on a daily basis. However, they are constrained by legal limits on engaging in active measures. The reverse is true of the U.S. government: the government can engage in proactive defense measures (such as active defense or hacking back) as well as offensive cyber operations, but lacks the same picture of the threat environment. Collaboration, therefore, is imperative. The defense industry already cooperates with the Defense Department through several institutional mechanisms. The DIB Cybersecurity (CS) Program, for instance, was established as a voluntary information-sharing initiative to share unclassified and classified cyber threat information. The DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) is the organization that implements the DIB CS Program. A similar information-sharing program within the defense sector exists through the National Defense Information Sharing and Analysis Center (NDISAC). While existing information-sharing efforts are important, they focus on aiding reactive, defensive postures to respond to recognized activity after it has already occurred. Moreover, they do not address threat actors as evolving organizations with organized campaign plans that may encompass a range of tradecraft. Put simply, the current approach fails to meet the challenge of anticipating and preempting the adversary. Therefore, public-private partnerships for national defense should be re-energized with the DC3 and NDISAC as the anchoring organizations to support a more robust, better-resourced collaborative effort. This effort should contain three elements: 1) an intelligence-sharing and joint analysis program across classification lines; 2) developing and routinely exercising playbooks; and 3) predefined countermeasures. First, an early warning program that is based on directed intelligence collection against threat actors and their TTPs to provide proactive information to network defenders is critical to ensure the long-term integrity of U.S national security innovation. Stakeholders across the defense industry and government, including the intelligence community, should build on and expand existing classified and unclassified intelligence-sharing efforts to get ahead of the threat, rather than responding to and sharing information about it after the fact. This is especially important for IP theft because there is little that can be done to repair the damage, absent a rapid responsive countermeasure, from the loss of proprietary information. An early warning program should include developing measurable indications and warning and aim to develop holistic assessments of threat actors as strategic, learning organizations with evolving TTPs. This will enable firms in the defense industry to be proactive about network and infrastructure defense in anticipation of future adversary behavior. Second, stakeholders should develop and routinely exercise playbooks that stipulate roles and responsibilities for scenarios involving likely adversaries where, due to early warning, theft of national security IP is imminent or a critical threshold has been breached. Playbooks should sync response efforts across the interagency to coordinate potential policy options taken by various departments and agencies. The outcomes of playbooks and exercises should drive decision-making about defensive strategies and emplacement of early warning assets (such as sensors), and refine collaborative intelligence collection and analysis. Playbooks should also explicitly recommend policy options for appropriate countermeasures that consider the compressed timeframe associated with responding before the adversary can capitalize on stolen property. The process of developing and exercising playbooks will also create shared expectations about and credibility for countermeasures at various thresholds. Finally, in cases where adversaries succeed in stealing valuable IP, the Defense Department in conjunction with select intelligence agencies should establish criteria and corresponding rules of engagement for offensive cyber countermeasures. Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) or select intelligence agencies can employ offensive cyber countermeasures in non-U.S. cyberspace to corrupt or degrade stolen national security information and the infrastructure and capabilities employed to acquire it. While it may be impossible for the CNMF to recover or neutralize all stolen IP in every case, offensive counter operations can still degrade the adversary’s capabilities and therefore make their operations costlier to conduct in the future. Therefore, these operations could serve a dual function of covert or overt signaling and attrition of adversary capabilities.

How does China envision the space industry from a strategic standpoint, and what are its long-term strategic objectives for outer space? Under President Xi Jinping, China’s strategic vision for space has become fairly comprehensive. Based on government statements about the sector and its development history, my understanding is that China’s primary space program interests and drivers currently revolve around a combination of military and economic interests, as well as being focused on scientific and technology development and political prestige. All of those interests have over time become more integrated and expanded under Xi, relative to prior leaders. Especially as we have seen China’s national space capabilities expand, the appetite for leadership in this field has expanded as well. It is evident that China’s space ambitions align with core interests of the Chinese Communist Party, which include providing public goods and services, fostering a world-class modern military, and presenting the party in a politically competent and prestigious light. Moreover, China aims to modernize the nation through the cultivation of a vibrant domestic technology and innovation ecosystem, leading to economic and social development. In the long term, China seeks to establish itself as a global space power, but the precise definition of what this means remains elusive. Regarding China’s objectives in space, being a global space power would likely imply being an innovative international leader in cutting-edge technology and possessing well-established commercial space services, especially in countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative. On the military side, becoming an established space power would likely mean that China’s leadership is confident in the success of its efforts to modernize the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), particularly in enhanced military access to information, the PLA’s ability to conduct joint force operations, and the ability to deny the same to adversaries during a potential conflict. In China’s view, what are the key areas of U.S.-China competition and cooperation in space? In the realm of U.S.-China space relations, there are numerous technology areas of competition on the horizon. Some key areas to highlight are commercial satellite constellations, reusable space launch and orbital vehicles, and on-orbit satellite services. China is pursuing the construction and deployment of a national broadband megaconstellation—effectively a nationalized version of SpaceX’s Starlink—with the China Satellite Network Group overseeing the project. The company was established in 2021 with the publicly stated goal of providing high-quality advanced technology and economic internet and information services. The structure of a space-based satellite megaconstellation provides for ubiquitous, or nearly ubiquitous, service coverage across a considerable span of territory—particularly helpful in reaching rural areas—and also would serve the needs and increase the resilience of PLA military information systems. Some conversation in China revolves around the need for the country to field its own satellite constellation. This discussion has focused on the current relatively unchallenged dominance of Starlink within low earth orbit. There are concerns among decision-makers and industry analysts in China that the country could fall behind technologically should it fail to capitalize on developing its own satellite constellation as a national infrastructure backbone, particularly as big data, Internet of Things devices, and 5G and 6G telecommunications become increasingly commonplace around the globe. China’s experimental orbital reusable space launch vehicle, known as the Shenlong space plane, has been compared to the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space plane. China has alleged that the United States uses the vehicle for spying purposes, therefore suggesting how China likely views the role of the Shenlong space plane in serving its own interests. Additionally, China’s private sector space-launch companies often look to SpaceX as a benchmark for their own development, including developing liquid-fuel rockets in addition to the more common solid-fuel rockets. Another area of technological competition lies in on-orbit satellite services, with various proposals for cleaning up debris, refueling satellites, and more. China’s successful testing of Shijian-21, an on-orbit servicing assembly and manufacturing satellite, in early 2022 indicates progress in this field. Shorter-term military implications and longer-term commercial implications include support for sustainability efforts in space to remove debris and extend the life of space systems via maintenance, repair, refueling, and other services, especially with the growing number of companies and nations proposing megaconstellations. Beyond scientific and technological prestige, China’s space ventures hold potential for both competition and cooperation with the United States and other countries. This includes projects like the Chinese space station (Tiangong), which contrasts with the International Space Station. China’s participation in the International Space Station is restricted by U.S. laws such as the 2011 Wolf Amendment, which imposes legal restrictions prohibiting NASA from performing scientific collaboration on space projects with China without congressional approval. China also aims to establish a permanent crewed lunar base in the 2030s, analogous to the U.S.-led Artemis Accords. While there are opportunities for scientific discussion and engagement between the United States and China in space, barriers like the Wolf Amendment and the involvement of China’s military in national space initiatives hinder political appetite. Geopolitical tensions, especially concerning key technologies like semiconductors, and a general lack of trust from both governments of one another’s larger strategic intentions create further challenges to cooperation. In the past, China and the United States have attempted to start a conversation through bilateral meetings, such as the 2015 U.S.-China Space Dialogue and the 2016 Space Security Exchange during the Obama administration, but talks have dwindled since 2017. Nevertheless, space diplomacy could still offer an additional and wide-reaching avenue for communication during an otherwise politically tense period in relations, especially in the context of international interest in climate cooperation and space sustainability and safety efforts. A new commercial launch site in Wenchang, Hainan, is under development. What are the feasibility, benefits, and challenges of this project? Does it signify the rise of China’s commercial space sector in contrast to the traditional state ownership of the industry? The idea of establishing a space port at Wenchang began in the 1970s, but it gained momentum in the early 21st century due to China’s perception of its control over the South China Sea relative to potential competitors like the United States. The port finally opened in 2016. The China National Space Administration has made significant improvements to its space bases, including Jiuquan in northwest Inner Mongolia, Taiyuan in northwestern Sichuan, Xichang in southern Sichuan, and Wenchang in Hainan. Wenchang’s natural location and proximity to the equator make it suitable for a wide variety of space missions, for both government and commercial launches. Wenchang is currently outfitted to support China’s government space exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, potentially including crewed missions. It is being expanded to serve as a central hub for commercial space launch and megaconstellation deployment, which will also bolster China’s military space capabilities. As a result, Wenchang will likely witness a rapid increase in launches from China—primarily on the commercial side, although the United States still leads in number of annual launches. Once the commercial launch facility has been expanded, Wenchang is expected to take over all orbital launches currently planned for Xichang, which will then serve as a backup launch site. The relocation is mainly due to safety concerns. Ever since a 1996 launch failure caused casualties on the ground, Xichang’s proximity to populated areas has necessitated evacuation warnings when a rocket is launched. Wenchang played a significant role in launching China’s Tiangong space station modules and supporting deep space missions. The local government of Hainan has reportedly shown interest in satellite launches as a means to boost the local economy, with recent focus on servicing government, military, and commercial needs. Regarding challenges, specific details are not provided by the government, but the potential for increased demand on Wenchang might lead to heightened competition between commercial private space launch companies and state-driven missions. While China’s private space sector is expected to grow, the government-manufactured Long March series of rockets will likely remain the primary launch platform for major Chinese space missions, at least in the near term. Nevertheless, opportunities for growth exist in providing launch services and payloads for domestic and foreign companies, particularly those involved in the Belt and Road Initiative. Overall, Wenchang’s development reflects a general increase in demand for diverse space launch capabilities across commercial, military, and government interests. It does not necessarily signify that China’s rising commercial space sector now surpasses state-driven missions in importance. The focus remains on expanding China’s space programming to cater to various primarily state-directed needs and priorities. What do you see as the general role of cyber actors in the space industry? What are some potential cybersecurity threats, and what safeguarding measures are being implemented to protect critical space assets? The space industry has become an attractive target for malicious cyber actors, with ground systems in particular being at high risk. Targeting specific assets and space organizations can be challenging, but relatively sophisticated malicious cyber actors, often with state backing, have demonstrated the capability and political motivation to achieve their goals by targeting space infrastructure, including satellites. The motivating factors behind such attacks can vary. They may include standard intellectual property theft, especially from private companies developing commercially or militarily valuable applications or products. Organizations and companies often develop their own intrusion skills and talent to better target space systems, likely through sponsored hacking competitions and exercises. For instance, the U.S. military sponsors hack-a-satellite competitions, and it is likely that China has similar initiatives. These competitions focus on hacking satellites or space-related assets as part of cybersecurity development efforts. Adjacent emerging technologies, such as quantum key distribution networks, have been introduced as a means to enhance defensive and security measures in the space sector. These networks involve both ground and space systems and are designed to increase the difficulty of hacking and breaking into quantum-based systems. China’s Strategic Support Force, established after 2015, combines the country’s military, cyberspace, and electronic warfare units. Their publications highlight ongoing research and development efforts, particularly in understanding emerging technologies to strengthen defensive assets, especially those that are difficult for humans to physically access regularly.

Ukraine’s defensive war—and its current counteroffensives to free its lands from Russian forces—demonstrate that directly affected countries are the best keepers of the balance of power. Because of the immediate and existential effects that war and occupation have on their daily life, such states have an acute interest in maintaining and, when needed, restoring the status quo. But motivation is not the same as capability: To keep the regional balance of power, these states need abundant and high-quality weapons. The United States should be the principal supplier of these capabilities, not least to control the proliferation of high-tech weapons, which Washington fears may be destabilizing. The outbreak of the most significant war of conquest since World War II makes plain that war is not a relic of a bygone age but a feature of the frontier. The United States should embrace geopolitical subsidiarity and arm allies with abundant and advanced capabilities.

Subsidiarity—the idea that nothing should be done by a larger entity that can be done by competent authorities closer to the problem—is rarely associated with international relations. Usually it describes a domestic structure of authority: Educating children is done most effectively at the level of the family and a local school rather than a centralized, national bureaucracy, just as safe streets are best provided by local police rather than a distant entity with expansive powers but limited knowledge and interest. The job of higher authorities, such as the state, is to support the locus of responsibility below. This is, of course, the basic idea behind federalism and other decentralized forms of governance.

Intellectual property (IP) has long been a sore point in relations between Washington and Beijing. US officials have repeatedly targeted China for widespread counterfeiting since its economic ‘opening up’ in the late 1970s. But after enduring a punishing series of legal reforms to join the World Trade Organization in 2001, the Chinese government is still under fire for weak enforcement, forced technology transfers and state-sponsored IP theft. Now China’s growing ability to produce IP indigenously is driving the evolution of US–China economic relations. In 2021, China was the world’s top patent filer for the third year in a row. Chinese firms have filed approximately 75 per cent of global artificial intelligence patents in the past decade and 40 per cent of all 6G patents, while the United States accounted for only 35 per cent of the latter. The country’s ability to produce IP across a number of critical and emerging technologies has been framed as evidence that China is surpassing the United States in knowledge production. While the significant growth in China’s patent filings point to genuine improvement in its ability to innovate, focussing on the number of filings is misleading. China’s production of more IP does not automatically translate into a strategic advantage in economic competition with the United States. Rather, it is high-quality IP that has assumed a critical role amidst globalisation and the emergence of global value chains, providing exclusive rights to license processes, brands and technologies essential for manufacturing. Value chains are hierarchical. At the apex, owners of high-quality IP dictate the terms of — and reap a greater proportion of profits from — economic activity taking place lower down in the value chain where the IP is paid for and used in assembly. ‘Moving up’ the value chain enables firms to capture a higher share of value added, giving countries a strategic advantage in dictating the terms of international trade. IP has become integral to economic power. The United States’ near-monopoly over high-quality IP ownership has allowed its firms to capture a disproportionate share of value added globally. US efforts to produce, regulate and protect IP can be framed as seeking to protect its power to shape the global economy. China’s leadership has doggedly pursued its own innovation pathway to maintain economic growth and avoid the middle-income trap by moving up the value chain. But regardless of Beijing’s intentions, this threatens US economic power conferred to it through greater IP ownership.

On a July day in 2018, Xiaolang Zhang headed to the San Jose, Calif., airport to board a flight to Beijing. He had passed the checkpoint at Terminal B when his journey was abruptly cut short by federal agents. After a tipoff by Apple’s security team, the former Apple employee was arrested and charged with stealing trade secrets related to the company’s autonomous-driving program. It was a skirmish in a continuing shadow war between the U.S. and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence. The two rivals are seeking any advantage to jump ahead in mastering a technology with the potential to reshape economies, geopolitics and war. Artificial intelligence has been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of critical U.S. technologies to protect, just as China placed it on a list of technologies it wanted its scientists to achieve breakthroughs on by 2025. China’s AI capabilities are already believed to be formidable, but U.S. intelligence authorities have lately made new warnings beyond the threat of intellectual-property theft. Instead of just stealing trade secrets, the FBI and other agencies believe China could use AI to gather and stockpile data on Americans at a scale that was never before possible. China has been linked to a number of significant thefts of personal data over the years, and artificial intelligence could be used as an “amplifier” to support further hacking operations, FBI Director Christopher Wray said, speaking at a press conference in Silicon Valley earlier this year. “Now they are working to use AI to improve their already-massive hacking operations using our own technology against us,” Wray said. China has denied engaging in hacking into U.S. networks. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said this summer that the U.S. was the “biggest hacking empire and global cyber thief” in the world, in response to allegations that Beijing had hacked into the unclassified email systems of several top-level Biden administration officials. A spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment. In recent years, the FBI’s interest in protecting American innovations in the area has more squarely targeted manufacturers of chips powerful enough to process artificial-intelligence programs, rather than on artificial-intelligence companies themselves. Even if insiders or hackers were able to steal algorithms underpinning an advanced system today, that system could be obsolete and overtaken by larger advancements by other engineers in six months, several former U.S. officials said. In 2022, the chip-manufacturing technology supplier Applied Materials sued a China-owned rival, Mattson Technology, alleging that a former Applied engineer stole trade secrets from Applied before leaving for Mattson. The case attracted the interest of federal prosecutors, although no criminal charges have been filed, according to people familiar with the matter. Mattson hasn’t been contacted by any federal agency over the matter, and there is no evidence that any Applied information taken was ever used by Mattson, a company spokesman said. Mattson, based in Fremont, Calif., was acquired in 2016 by an investment arm of the city of Beijing, which currently owns about 45% of the company, the spokesman said. The case remains in litigation. In November, Mattson sued Applied, claiming that engineers at Applied had applied for patents using intellectual property developed while they were working at Mattson. Fears of how China could use AI have grown so acute over the past year that the FBI director and leaders of other Western intelligence agencies met in October with technology leaders in the field to discuss the issue. Makers of AI technology are concerned about their secrets making their way to China, too, according to executives at these companies. Recently, OpenAI reached out to the FBI after a forensic investigation of a former employee’s laptop raised suspicions that the employee had taken company secrets to China, according to people familiar with the company. The employee was later exonerated, according to a person familiar with the matter. U.S. intelligence analysts have worried for years about the long-tail espionage dividends that China is believed to be reaping from amassing enormous troves of hacked personal information belonging to American officials and business executives. Over the past decade, Beijing has been linked to the hacks of hundreds of millions of customer records from Marriott International, the credit agency Equifax and the health insurer Anthem (now known as Elevance Health), among others, as well as more than 20 million personnel files on current and former U.S. government workers and their families from the Office of Personnel Management. The heists were so huge and frequent that Hillary Clinton, then a Democratic presidential candidate, accused China of “trying to hack into everything that doesn’t move.” China has denied responsibility for each of those heists. China was so good at stealing private information—billions of pieces of data in all, according to U.S. officials, criminal indictments and cyber-threat researchers—that its hackers had likely collected too much of a good thing: an informational treasure trove so vast that humans would be incapable of locating the right patterns. Artificial intelligence, however, would have no such limitations. Microsoft believes China is already using its AI capabilities to comb these vast data sets, said Brad Smith, the company’s president, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Initially the big question was did anyone, including the Chinese, have the capacity to use machine learning and fundamentally AI to federate these data sets and then use them for targeting,” he said. “In the last two years we’ve seen evidence that that, in fact, has happened.” Smith cited the 2021 China-linked attack on tens of thousands of servers running Microsoft’s email software as an example. “We saw clear indications of very specific targeting,” he said. “I think we should assume that AI will be used to continue to refine and improve targeting, among other things.” Smith didn’t address the issue of AI technology being stolen by China. In the 2018 case, the former Apple employee Zhang pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets and is set to be sentenced in February. His plea agreement is under seal. Apple declined to comment. U.S. authorities believe Chinese intelligence operatives are correlating sensitive information across the databases they have stolen over the years from OPM, health insurers and banks—including fingerprints, foreign contacts, financial debts and personal medical records—to locate and track undercover U.S. spies and pinpoint officials with security clearances. Passport information stolen in the Marriott hack could help spies monitor a government official’s travel, for example, counterintelligence analysts have said. “China can harness AI to build a dossier on virtually every American, with details ranging from their health records to credit cards and from passport numbers to the names and addresses of their parents and children,” said Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency. “Take those dossiers and add a few hundred thousand hackers working for the Chinese government, and we’ve got a scary potential national security threat.” Although executives including Smith are concerned by the weaponization of AI, they point out that this technology can be used to spot and mitigate attacks, too. “We believe that if we do our work well and we’re determined to do our work well, we can use AI as a more potent defensive shield than it can be used as an offensive weapon,” Smith said. “And that’s what we need to do.”

As China expands its presence in orbit, the U.S. Space Force continues to express concern about Beijing’s advancing satellite capabilities. The latest cause for alarm is China’s deployment of imaging satellites in geostationary orbit. China, to be sure, has operated optical imaging satellites in GEO for nearly a decade. Still, the capabilities of these earlier satellites are limited compared to China’s latest additions in 2023. One that has caught the Space Force’s attention is an advanced optical imaging satellite launched in December, Yaogan-41. With an estimated resolution of 2.5 meters, it brings a significant improvement over previous GEO optical satellites capped at 15-meter resolution. This level of visual fidelity would allow China to spot vehicles, aircraft, and vessels across wide regions. Another is a GEO-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellite, Ludi Tance-4, that can see through clouds and darkness. Paired with the optical resolution of Yaogan-41, China now potentially has persistent visual and radar surveillance over strategically important areas like the Indo-Pacific. This has defense officials worried. Chief Master Sgt. Ronald Lerch, intelligence specialist at the Space Systems Command, said these new satellites take China’s space-based intelligence gathering to a new level. Speaking Jan. 30 at an industry conference, Lerch said the U.S. military views Yaogan-41 and Ludi Tance-4 as a qualitative leap in capabilities for tracking and targeting. Clayton Swope, a former U.S. intelligence official and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, estimates that Yaogan-41 should allow continuous surveillance of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, Taiwan, and mainland China. “Paired with data from other Chinese surveillance satellites, Yaogan-41 could provide China an unprecedented ability to identify and track car-sized objects throughout the entire Indo-Pacific region and put at risk numerous U.S. and allied naval and air assets operating in the region,” he said. While most remote sensing satellites operate in low Earth orbit for cheaper access and better resolution, it’s notable that China chooses to invest in far more expensive geostationary spacecraft stationed 22,000 miles above Earth, Swope said. It would be difficult to precisely identify small objects from that high orbit, but if there’s a particular item of interest, they would task lower-flying satellites to take a closer look. Potentially problematic for the U.S. military is that an optical sensor like Yaogan-41, in certain conditions, could spot stealth aircraft designed to be undetected by radar. “If there are no clouds, you could see an aircraft with an optical capability,” Swope said. The Chinese government said the SAR satellite was designed mostly for civilian use. However, the U.S. military has cast doubts on those claims, given the lack of transparency surrounding Chinese space activities. “Going forward, the Pentagon should consider that China might be able to detect and track aircraft,” Swope said, “even those designed to evade radar.” Clouds do obscure optical space sensors, and AI algorithms make mistakes, but “relentless advances in Chinese surveillance capabilities could soon produce an Indo-Pacific region where there is no place to hide,” Swope noted. It’s no surprise that the U.S. Army’s new guidance on space operations released Jan. 8 recognizes the likelihood that American forces and allies will operate under continuous surveillance. Swope views the Army’s memo as significant, signaling broader awareness of the role of space in all aspects of warfare. While it may not be possible to conceal activities entirely from satellite observation, U.S. forces on the ground may have to devise techniques to introduce confusion. Drawing from historical precedents like the Allies’ D-Day deception plan during World War II, the U.S. military could use decoys and diversions to make it more difficult to interpret satellite data and discern genuine from deceptive activities, Swope observed. Critics may dismiss the Space Force’s warnings about China’s progress in space as alarmist, but it’s important for the Space Force to keep talking about this because all branches of the armed forces would be impacted by what happens in space, Swope said. “It’s very easy for the space community to talk amongst themselves,” he added. But this is a conversation that needs to extend across the Pentagon and the armed services to better prepare for an era where space dominance correlates with military superiority.

[Megan; Megan Gates is the senior editor at Security Management covering emerging cybersecurity threats and trends, banking and finance, cultural properties security, executive protection, and legal issues related to the security profession. Additionally, on Fridays she covers breaking news security incidents with analysis from practitioners or individuals impacted as part of the publication's Today in Security articles. Gates is also the editor-in-chief of the magazine's tech supplement, Security Technology; “An Unfair Advantage: Confronting Organized Intellectual Property Theft”, 1 July 2020; https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-magazine/articles/2020/07/an-unfair-advantage-confronting-organized-intellectual-property-theft/]

She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the ASBPE 2022 Stephen Barr Award for Feature Writing and a 2021 APEX Award of Excellence for Technical and Technology Writing. In addition to being published by Security Management, ​her work's been featured in Reuters, USA TODAY College, The Springfield Business Journal, The Cedar Rapids Gazette, Celebrate Arkansas Magazine, and The Joplin Globe.​ ​​​​​​​​​She holds a Bachelor's of Science in Journalism with a minor in Film Studies from Missouri State University.

China's theft of intellectual property in technology, including in AI, and other trade secrets is a major threat to the West, global intelligence leaders warn. Intelligence leaders from the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand — collectively known as the Five Eyes — explain that the scale of China's theft is unprecedented. FBI Director Christopher Wray believes China is the "defining threat of this generation." "There is no country that presents a broader, more comprehensive threat to our ideas, our innovation, our economic security and ultimately our national security," Wray said. "We have seen efforts by the Chinese government, directly or indirectly, trying to steal intellectual property, trade secrets, personal data — all across the country." Why is China's espionage such a threat? A company based in China was convicted of stealing the technology secrets of wind turbine technology company. The company lost its competitive advantage, sales collapsed and the company laid off nearly 700 workers. China's threat extends beyond just espionage, the intelligence leaders said. The Five Eyes also warned of China's meddling in elections and violence aimed at silencing Chinese dissidents living in their countries. The video player is currently playing an ad. What makes China's spying different? Countries spying on each other is nothing new, but the scale and techniques of China's operation worries the intelligence leaders. All countries spy to covertly learn information, Australia's Director-General of Security Mike Burgess said. "But the behavior we're talking about here goes well beyond traditional espionage," Burgess said of China. "This scale of the theft is unprecedented in human history." Burgess said the scale is why they felt it was important to call out China's activities publicly. "Essentially what you have with the Chinese government is the autocracy and oppressive regime of, you know, East Germany combined with the cutting edge technology of Silicon Valley," Wray said. "And the combination represents a daunting first of its kind threat for the United States and for our allies." What is China stealing? Wray pointed to theft from Fortune 100 companies down to small startups. He said the theft occurs in the fields of agriculture, biotech, health care, robotics, aviation and academic research. "We probably have somewhere in the order of 2,000 active investigations that are just related to the Chinese government's effort to steal information," Wray said. Ken McCallum, director general of the U.K.'s MI5, said the espionage concerns include government and military secrets and critical infrastructure. He also worries about the theft targeting academic research at universities and startup companies. "People, in short, who probably don't think national security is about them," McCallum said. How is China stealing information? The theft happens in several ways, McCallum said. Company employees are often manipulated, sometimes without being aware of what's happening. "We have seen, for example, the use of professional networking sites to reach out in sort of masked, disguised ways to people in the U.K., either who have security clearance or who are working in interesting areas of technology," he said. "We've now seen over 20,000 examples of that kind of disguised approach to people in the U.K. who have information that the Chinese state wishes to get its hands on." "It is a threat to our way of life in a number of ways," Wray said. "The first is that when people talk about stealing innovation or intellectual property, that's not just a Wall Street problem. That's a Main Street problem. That means American jobs, American families, American livelihoods, and the same thing for every one of our five countries, directly impacted by that theft. It's not some abstract concept. It has flesh and blood, kitchen-table consequences." China also has the biggest hacking program in the world, FBI Director Wray said. "[It has] stolen more of our personal and corporate data than every nation, big or small, combined," Wray said. Chinese companies overseen by the Communist Party are also a concern, the intelligence leaders said. Sometimes Chinese companies acquire land and companies in other countries for espionage purposes, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service David Vigneault said. "We've seen a variety of efforts by Chinese businesses, in some cases state-owned enterprises, in some cases ostensibly private companies, attempting to acquire businesses, land, infrastructure, what have you, in the United States in a way that presents national security concerns," Wray said. What are intelligence leaders doing to stop China's global espionage campaign? The Five Eyes intelligence leaders privately met Wednesday with 15 top Silicon Valley executives and Stanford University. They came into the meetings to figure out ways to protect the companies and their intellectual property, Wray said. The companies, in turn, told the intelligence heads some of their needs and how they felt they could help. MI5 Director General McCallum has a message for companies that may now want their guidance. "I would say that if you are operating at the cutting edge of tech in this decade, you may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you," McCallum said. "And you would be reckless, not just with my secrets but with your own company's viability, with your shareholders' capital if you didn't think about what that means." The Five Eyes partnership is an important part of the effort dealing with intelligence threats, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Director-General Andrew Hampton said. The Five Eyes' message to China With all the worries over China, Wray said the U.S. still welcomes business, visitors and academic exchange with China, but not cheating, theft or repression. "I would say to the Chinese government, if they want to be a great nation, it's time for them to start acting like one," Wray said. "And that includes abiding by its own commitments not to steal innovation. That includes not exporting repression to other countries. That includes working with all of our countries and all the other countries that we work with all the time who have common threats, like cybercrime, fentanyl trafficking, money laundering. It means not working with criminals but rather working to uphold the rule of law." China, for its part, had its own message to the Five Eyes, saying in part: "We firmly oppose the groundless allegations and smears toward China."

For over a generation, China has been appropriating U.S. technology discovery, building new industries from those new technologies and selling them around the globe, including back to us. Many recent technologies that China leads in, like lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries and photovoltaic solar, were not invented in China. They were mostly discovered in America, supported by significant U.S. government funding. To a large degree, U.S. counter efforts on China’s technology appropriation have been focused on preventing more stealing, and the response to what has been already appropriated has been mostly to just complain. However, the U.S. government has significant intellectual property and contractual rights to much of that technology due to its financial support of technology research at the early stages. The U.S. should take action to recover that intellectual property and halt China from selling products in the U.S. and globally that violate those rights. This could significantly repatriate the manufacturing of stolen technology to the U.S. and also prevent China from appropriating and commercializing even more U.S. technology being developed with the assistance of taxpayer funding. U.S. government agencies provide more than $150 billion in funding per year for discoveries of all types, including those from the Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, Health and Human Services, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The government typically has several types of IP and commercialization rights embedded in the grants as a part of that funding. The largest IP rights bucket is under the terms of the Bayh-Dole and Stevenson-Wydler Acts, which require research recipients to attempt to commercialize any inventions that come from their work, with specific obligations. If the recipients don’t execute on those terms, the government has “march-in rights” to reclaim the IP and control how the rights are subsequently licensed. Any appropriation of IP from labs, universities or companies supported by the U.S. government, from open source or illegal appropriation by the Chinese, is likely in violation of the IP requirements under the acts. And the various government agencies already have authorization to march in on the IP and exert legal rights. Another common legal requirement of government technology research and development grants is a “build in America” clause. This typically requires that if the technology becomes commercialized, it must be materially built in the U.S. to be sold here. These and other historical federal funding requirements for many technologies now being sold by China are likely being violated. So instead of wringing our hands and complaining about all that has been stolen by the Chinese, the government should exert its various rights and prevent China from selling those products. The government could start a China IP Initiative to claw back our discovery commercialization in energy, biotechnology, information technology and other sectors. The respective agencies could identify key technologies that were supported under Bayh-Dole and other authorities, coordinate with the Justice Department, which manages litigation for the departments and take action to secure the IP and enforce its rights globally. It could also possibly work through the Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission to issue Section 337 actions that would prevent those affected products from being sold in the U.S. In addition, the government could extend its actions to international jurisdictions, like the European Union, whose legal IP protections could likely support our action there too. There are possibly similar IP protections in the European Union, United Kingdom and elsewhere that could also be enforced based on early governed funding in those jurisdictions. The U.S. government provides significant support for research and development. In doing so it has clear IP rights, and no new legislative authority is needed to act on these material rights. The government should take action with these rights to reclaim and protect the investment from Chinese appropriation.

[Derek Scissors is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on the Chinese and Indian economies and on US economic relations with Asia. He has worked for London-based Intelligence Research Ltd., taught economics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and served as an action officer in international economics and energy for the US Department of Defense. He also served as a commissioner on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Dr. Scissors has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate from Stanford University.], 14 October 2021, “Can Biden Stop China's Intellectual Property Theft?”, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/can-biden-stop-chinas-intellectual-property-theft-194751

The Wall Street Journal published a story yesterday on Chinese courts declaring their firms can’t be sued anywhere in the world for theft of intellectual property and in two cases threatening fines of $1 million per week if suits go forward. The US government is aware but has done nothing. This is just one, recent event in decades of intellectual property (IP) theft and coercion by China and utter American failure to respond.

Given the existence and legislative history of Section 337, it is an ideal tool to be adapted for today’s U.S. trade challenges. But to operationalize it in a way that is effective—and also not too broad—there are a number of reforms Congress, USITC, and the Biden administration should make.

Beef up 337’s unfair trade provisions.

Climate change is a global crisis and cannot be solved by any one country alone. If the United States, China and other industrialized countries do not come together to dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions, the world we leave our children and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable. Tragically, the cooperation required to address this existential threat is being undermined by hawks in both the United States and China who are moving us toward a disastrous cold war. Now is the time for a radical rethinking of geopolitics to reflect the reality that international cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet. Here’s the reality. The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record. This year is on track to be the hottest year in recorded history, and this past July was the hottest month on record. Across the United States, July broke more than 3,200 daily temperature records and dozens of American cities broke or tied their previous daily temperature records three or more times. Phoenix experienced 31 days in a row at or above 110F (43.3C), 13 days longer than the previous record. El Paso, Miami, Austin and many other places also suffered under record-breaking stretches of extreme heat. Smoke from unprecedented wildfires in Canada enveloped US cities and drifted halfway around the world, causing dangerously unhealthy air quality. Vermont, my home state, experienced floods that damaged 4,000 homes and 800 businesses, the state’s worst natural disaster since 1927. In Maui, Hawaii, rapidly moving fires destroyed 2,700 structures in historic Lahaina and took more than 100 lives, making it the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century. But it’s not just the US that is dealing with record-breaking heatwaves and enormous climate-caused devastation. China experienced record-high temperatures last month, including the country’s all-time temperature record of 126F (52.2C), and recent flooding has killed about 100 people, destroyed nearly 200,000 homes, displaced some 1.5 million people and caused more than $13bn in damage. From Tokyo to Rome to Tunis to Tirana, cities across Asia, Europe and north Africa experienced their hottest days on record. In Iran, the heat index hit 158F (70C), testing the limits of human survival. In our own hemisphere, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador all saw temperature records fall. It’s winter right now in South America, but that hasn’t stopped temperatures from exceeding 100F (37.7C) in some places, a heating event a climate historian labeled “one of the extreme events the world has ever seen”. And it’s not just that temperatures have been soaring on land. Our oceans have never been warmer. Right now, 44% of the world’s oceans are experiencing a marine heatwave. The Mediterranean Sea is experiencing its hottest temperatures on record, more than 9F hotter than average in some places. Off the coast of Newfoundland, waters are as much as 18F above normal. South of Miami, waters reached 101F (38.3C). You’re supposed to find temperatures like that in a hot tub, not the ocean. This warming could further devastate coral reefs, fisheries and marine ecosystems around the world. In the midst of this global crisis, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that recent years have seen long-overdue steps to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels into more efficient and renewable energy sources. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act included an unprecedented $300bn in investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, which could help increase US solar energy by 500% and more than double wind energy by 2035, reducing carbon emissions by roughly 40%. Other countries have also made major investments. China spent $546bn on clean energy last year and continues to manufacture and deploy more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. By 2030, China may deploy enough renewable energy to essentially power the entire US electrical grid three times over. The European Union has laid out a plan to invest more than $1tn over the next decade in renewables and energy efficiency, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared with 1990. Importantly, large sections of the corporate world have turned away from investments in fossil fuels and are now spending hundreds of billions on sustainable energy. Altogether, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the global community to invest $1.6tn in wind, solar power, electric vehicles, batteries, and electric grids this year, compared with just $1tn in fossil fuels. This progress has led the IEA to forecast that renewables will surpass coal to become the largest source of global electricity generation by early 2025, much faster than previously predicted. The bad news is that we are still falling well short of the kinds of investments needed to deal with this crisis. We are still not moving fast enough to save our planet. The latest report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that without more urgent action, the world will pass the key 1.5C (2.7F) threshold by the early 2030s, risking a far deadlier future for our children and future generations. The science is clear: if the US, China, and the rest of the planet do not act with greater urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, our planet will face enormous and irreversible damage. Let’s be clear: since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the US has put more carbon into the atmosphere, by far, than any other country. While the new technologies sustained by fossil fuels improved our standard of living, we laid the groundwork for the climate calamity the planet is now experiencing. In recent years, the rapidly growing Chinese economy has eclipsed the US as the world’s major carbon emitter. Right now, China is building six times as many coal-fired power plants as the rest of the world combined – the equivalent of two new coal plants every week. Last year, they quadrupled the number of new coal plants approved compared with 2021. Current plans will see China add as much new coal to its grid as used in all of India, the second largest coal user, and five times more coal capacity as the US. It is no great secret the Chinese government is undertaking many policies that we and the international community should oppose. They are cruelly repressing and interning the Uyghurs, threatening Taiwan and stifling freedom of expression in Tibet and Hong Kong. China has bullied its neighbors, abused the global trading system, stolen technology and is building out a dystopian surveillance state. The US is rightly organizing its allies to press Beijing on these and other issues. But organizing most of our national effort around a zero-sum global confrontation with China is unlikely to change Chinese behavior and will alienate allies and partners. Most importantly, it could doom our planet by making climate cooperation impossible between the world’s two largest greenhouse emitters. We need to move in a bold new direction. Recent history provides some instructive examples.

Two things can be said of the continuing delay to renewing the US–China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement. The good news is that the two sides are still talking about continuing with the landmark 45-year-old agreement, which has yielded historic levels of research collaboration and student exchanges between the two countries. The bad news is that one or both sides could still walk away. This would be catastrophic. Wisdom and forward thinking must prevail. Before China and the United States established diplomatic relations on 1 January 1979, there was little or no formal relationship between the two nations, and high levels of mistrust. Science cooperation was identified as offering a relatively swift way to break the ice and begin establishing people-to-people contacts. Then-US president Jimmy Carter and China’s premier at the time, Deng Xiaoping, signed the science agreement before the month was out, on 31 January.

US and China likely to delay renewal of key science pact again

SINGAPORE—When a landmark science and technology agreement between the U.S. and China reached its expiration in late February without an extension, it plunged the academic community in both countries into uncertainty. Neither country confirmed an extension for nine days. Had it lapsed? Not really, it turns out. But the extension was made so quietly as to be imperceptible, without an official statement published online. And for a second time in a row, it would only keep the agreement alive for another six months while Washington and Beijing continue negotiations. The U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement was the first bilateral deal signed after Washington formally recognized the Communist-ruled People’s Republic of China in 1979. At the time, China was a scientific laggard and the U.S. saw the pact as a way to influence China’s behavior and developmental trajectory. Nowadays, each country is simultaneously the other’s biggest research partner and its biggest rival, as the world’s two largest economies compete for global leadership in areas such as quantum computing, biotechnology and nanoscience. Over the decades, the agreement was renewed as a matter of course, for five-year extensions, even as more U.S. institutions grew increasingly wary of collaborating with Chinese counterparts. Then in August of last year, with bilateral tensions at a boil, the two sides could manage only a six-month extension—just enough to keep the landmark deal from collapsing. As the next deadline approached in February this year, the tone of bilateral ties was better—though not enough for a full renewal. The stealthiness of the latest move, and the prolonged nature of the deeper discussions, highlight the complex state of U.S.-China relations, as both countries try to work out new parameters of engagement and rivalry while vying for global technological and military supremacy. “The two sides have to figure out how to operate and engage with each other as peer colleagues and peer competitors,” said Deborah Seligsohn, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. Both proponents and critics say the agreement hasn’t kept up with changes in bilateral ties and the two countries’ respective strategic priorities. Critics of the deal say that in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, clearer distinctions are needed between military and civilian uses. Trade tensions over clean technologies such as electric vehicles, solar panels and batteries have also been growing. The U.S. and China agreed in a separate deal last year to hold talks aimed at addressing the risks of artificial intelligence. Both sides have also collaborated on international climate diplomacy and say cooperation is necessary in areas such as public health and food security. “Strengthened protections in the agreement will be essential for any longer-term extension,” the State Department wrote in response to a request for comment on the deal, adding that officials were realistic about China’s national priorities and domestic legal landscape.

In a unanimous vote on Thursday, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a bill to impose greater congressional scrutiny on future efforts by the State Department to enter, renew or extend any science and technology agreement with China. The bill could pose a significant hurdle to the periodic renewal of the Science and Technology Agreement (STA), which was originally signed in 1979 by US President Jimmy Carter and Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping as the first bilateral deal between the two nations. Introduced by Representative Andy Barr, Republican of Kentucky, the bill mandates that the secretary of state provide to Congress detailed information about and such agreements, including their benefits and risks, before pursuing them. If passed, the administration would also need to wait at least 30 days post-submission before proceeding with agreements, during which Congress would assess national security risks and human rights considerations. The committee approved the bill 50-0; a specific date for a vote on the House floor has not been set, nor one for the Senate. Renewed every five years, the STA received a six-month extension instead of a full renewal last August. It was extended again in February but only for another six months. That extension was not announced by the White House and administration officials have not commented on the matter. Under the existing agreement, both American and Chinese researchers have enjoyed financial, legal, and political support for decades, fostering scientific collaboration. Advocates of the agreement say that it shields American scientists in China and facilitates research in the US by granting access to crucial Chinese databases, particularly in fields like health studies. However, critics contend that China’s state supervision and control over science and technology projects within its borders have allowed Beijing to exploit the STA, addressing scientific gaps, honed skills and capitalising on the decentralised American academic landscape to establish dominance in sectors such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. Members of the US Congress have also emphasised the need to assess risks and evaluate the STA’s impact on American innovation. In support of the bill, Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said that China “has abused the openness of the American scientific community to steal American research and co-opt it for its own malignant purposes, including to surveil the Chinese public and strengthen its military-industrial complex”. The select committee welcomed the bill’s passage and in a post on X, formerly Twitter, said that the legislation would prevent a further extension of the STA “unless Secretary Blinken justifies that the CCP has improved its egregious human rights record”. A similar Senate bill, sponsored by a group of Republican senators including Marco Rubio of Florida, Todd Young of Indiana, Ted Cruz of Texas and Katie Britt of Alabama, was introduced in September. According to a statement, the senators contended the bill was needed because of “concerns that research partnerships organised under the STA could (...) be used to develop technologies that could later be used against the US”. Denis Simon, a distinguished fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies, said that Thursday’s vote sent “an additional negative message about this agreement that is unnecessary”. According to Simon, who has spoken to officials from both sides involved in the talks, the State Department has already been made aware of the congressional interest in heightened political scrutiny and is “giving due deference to areas of concern”. He added that as a result of political pressure, the agreement has been narrowed to focus on areas that are “pretty neutral”: global climate change, global pandemics and global health, food security and clean energy. Separately on Thursday, the foreign affairs committee passed a bipartisan bill to sanction all 205 members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and their adult family members. The bill, sponsored by Representative Lisa McClain, Republican of Michigan, passed 28-22. According to the bill text, the president could waive the sanctions if he determines that Beijing has stopped the “genocide” of the Uygur Muslims, as well as all forms of threats, military exercises and aggression towards Taiwan, its undermining of Hong Kong’s autonomy, and efforts to steal US intellectual property. Barr said that the legislation was a “common sense step to encourage the [Chinese Communist Party] to choose responsible action and respect for human rights over malign activities and political oppression.” Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, the committee’s senior Democrat, opposed the bill. “By sanctioning all top leaders in one fell swoop, it would rupture the United States-China relationship while failing to deter China and its malign behaviour,” he said. He added that it would affect US officials and businesses that “may need to engage PRC officials to advance the United States’ interest”

Republican lawmakers on Wednesday asked the U.S. Commerce Department whether the U.S. government had funded research that resulted in Chinese patents, aiming to highlight what they view as the risks of renewing a bilateral science and technology agreement.

The decades-old U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement (STA) expired in August, but the U.S. State Department has issued two six-month extensions in order to continue negotiations with Beijing over renewing it.