Technological innovation has always played a key role in great power rivalries. Technological leadership has helped fuel US’s economic advantage and military predominance. To underpin its own rise, China now faces an ‘innovation imperative’, i.e. it needs to obtain and develop technologies in order to continue climbing the global value chain, overcome the ‘middle-income trap’ and equip itself with critical military resources. China has sought to close this technological gap by adopting a wide panoply of geoeconomic means ranging from new industrial policies to technological cooperation and acquisition. The United States has responded by increasingly seeking to decouple from the Chinese economy and putting pressure on others to follow suit. In addition, recent export control measures against Russia suggest that the U.S. and her allies are prepared to take strong decoupling measures under extreme circumstances. The panel discusses what effects technological decoupling is having on technological cooperation and progress with China, and whether decoupling is set to increase or decrease over time.
Puhujat
Edward Hunter Christie is a Senior Research Fellow in Geoeconomics at FIIA and a Senior Fellow with the Prague Security Studies Institute. He served as a NATO official from 2014 to 2020, holding successive roles relating to defence economics, strategic foresight, and technology policy. His research interests include geoeconomics, economic statecraft, defence economics, defence innovation, artificial intelligence, NATO, and great power competition.
Valtteri Vuorisalo is a Professor of Practice for National Security and Security Policy at Tampere University. Dr. Vuorisalo is also Senior Visting Research Fellow at King’s College London, Department of War Studies, and member of board at the Scientific Advisory Board for Defence in the Ministry of Defence (MATINE). His research focus revolves around the theme of flow security, and the security impact of data and information flows especially. He holds a PhD from the University of Tampere.
Charly Salonius-Pasternak is a Leading Researcher at FIIA and leads the work of the Center on US Politics and Power (CUSPP). His work at FIIA focuses on international security issues, especially Nordic and transatlantic security (including NATO), as well as U.S. foreign and defence policy. Recently he has focused on Finnish-Swedish defence cooperation and the evolution of US and NATO alliance reassurance approaches in light of the changed regional security situation. In 2017, he was a visiting research fellow at the Changing Character of War programme at Pembroke College (Oxford University), where he studied the hybridization of warfare and the impact of the Information Age on the character of war.