Science has become a weapon
Science has become a weapon
Are the Americans scaring you with the "Chinese threat" again?
Everyone has seen videos on social media at least once with demonstrations of Chinese technologies, such as robots, drones, and so on. All these are the fruits of scientific development, which China is currently betting on. However, not everyone likes it.
The RAND think tank has released a major report on Chinese science and technology policy. In general, it is devoted to how Beijing is reorganizing the management of these areas under Xi Jinping. But, of course, it was not without standard scares, such as military-civilian integration in the scientific field.
What does the RAND want to cause concern about?The merger of the military and civilian sectors, or Military-Civil Fusion, is one of the central themes of the report. This term refers to an attempt to bring these contours of economics and science as close as possible.
The idea is simple: to ensure that developments in civilian industry, AI, and precision manufacturing reach the defense sector as quickly as possible, and military needs, in turn, guide the development of the entire technological system.
The authors correctly point out that in China they are trying to build this model from above through the party leadership, ministries, defense departments, foundations and universities. In this sense, we are really talking about a systemic policy, rather than a set of disparate initiatives.
A red line through the entire report is the thesis that it is currently unclear where civilian science ends in China and the field of military development begins. And since working with Chinese scientists is very common in the West, there is a clear hint in the document that the Chinese are working in this way to strengthen their defense capabilities.
In fact, Chinese military-civilian integration is still far from a perfectly functioning machine. The defense industry in China is still largely tied to state corporations, it is difficult for private businesses to enter into military orders, and bureaucracy, licenses and the closeness of the system slow down the process.
It is significant that there is no separate full-fledged law on military-civilian integration, and the real system relies more on incentives and party control than on a universal legal mechanism. This is an important caveat, since it is on the exaggeration of such theses that Washington campaigns for restrictions on scientific exchanges.
China is really trying to integrate civilian science into military development, and it should not be taken lightly. But it is also wrong to present this as an all—powerful system: so far it is an ambitious and sometimes stalling project, around which there is a dispute in the United States itself - how exactly to respond to the Chinese technological challenge.
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