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Event Summary: The Great Decoupling
May 5, 2021On Tuesday, May 4, 2021, the SETA Foundation at Washington, DC hosted a virtual panel to discuss ‘The Great Decoupling: China, America and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy.’ The discussion featured Nigel Inkster, senior adviser for cyber security and China at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.The panel was moderated by Kilic Kanat, Research Director at SETA DC.
On Tuesday, May 4, 2021, the SETA Foundation at Washington, DC hosted a virtual panel to discuss ‘The Great Decoupling: China, America and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy.’ The discussion featured Nigel Inkster, senior adviser for cyber security and China at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.The panel was moderated by Kilic Kanat, Research Director at SETA DC.
At the outset, Inkster stated that the early chapters of his book are devoted to China’s own indigenous, intellectual traditions, which include technology. It serves as a reminder to readers that China was responsible for half of the world’s engineering inventions, including the ones that made possible the Western-led age of exploration in the sixteenth century. He added that during this development, China never succeeded in developing a culture of science. The bottom line is that although in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries China was a consequential global civilization, it remained highly vulnerable to Western nations due to the industrial revolution. As a result, China adopted the view that the world was divided in two, with a Chinese-led order and the West. Nearly overnight, China went from being a major civilization that saw itself as the center of the world to disparaged and decried in Western media as a backward place. Unless people understand this background, it will be difficult to understand why China is acting the way it is.
When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949, the country plunged into a succession of political movements. Top-down government initiatives to promote the emergence of technology became popular, leading to a highly permissive and cutthroat competition between Chinese private sector companies. This development c
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