Great Powers and Tech Industries in a Globalized World

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Important technologies and industries have long concerned great powers due to their pertinence to not only economic strengths but also national autonomy and sometimes military capabilities. Great powers often put much effort in boosting development and protecting their leadership in these technologies and industries, yet these efforts can be fraught with tensions and sometimes lead to great power conflicts. At the same time, globalization, including transnational production and demanding international rules, have significantly complicated these efforts. This panel features five papers that illuminate 1) the objectives, strategies, and efficacy of rising powers’ interventions, and 2) technology conflicts between the rising power and the dominant power in the context of globalization, with particular attention to China and its tech war with the US.

Jeffrey Ding’s paper examines how rising powers assess technological self-sufficiency in a globalizing world. Case studies of China, India, and Japan show that due to their tech industries’ substantial reliance on transnational ties, policymakers adopt more malleable boundaries despite their hope for “indigenous innovation.” Yeling Tan’s paper asks how local states in China implement the central government’s shift to self-reliance and supply chain resilience. Using an original dataset of local policies combined with fine-grained economic data, the paper shows that a locality's degree of embeddedness in global supply chains, alongside perceptions of political risk, shapes its available strategies. The paper by Anton Malkin and Karl Yan intervenes in the debate surrounding the efficacy of China’s industrial policies by focusing on the prominent sectors of electric vehicles, railways, and semiconductors. It finds that Chinese policymakers’ response to exogenous shocks – sharp fluctuations in external supply or demand for the industry’s core products or services – makes or breaks industrial policy.

The next two papers focus on the US-China tech war. Yan Xu’s paper draws from security studies to examine the origins and escalatory dynamics of the tech war. Using processing tracing, it argues that the conflict broke out due to the securitization of China’s shifting industrial policy for semiconductors – from specialization to indigenization – and that it escalated through a downward spiral akin to the security dilemma. The paper by Taylor Fravel and John Minnich provides a comprehensive assessment of the chip war’s causes, conduct, and implications using a combination of close reading of primary documents, interviews with policymakers, and analysis of proprietary semiconductor industry data. The authors argue that the conflict is best understood as a case of limited economic war where Washington’s aim is to degrade China’s power through brute force.

Sub Unit

• Division 16: International Political Economy

Individual Presentations

• Who Is Us?: The Globalization of Innovation and Measuring Technology Dependence - Jeffrey Ding, George Washington University

• Local States in World Markets: Economic Security in an Interdependent World - Yeling Tan, University of Oxford

• Success amid Failure: External Shocks and China’s Industrial Policies - Anton Malkin, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen; Karl Yan, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

• The Origins and Escalatory Dynamics of the US-China Chip War - Yan Xu, Brown University

• Assessing the Causes, Conduct, and Implications of the U.S.-China “Chip War” - M. Taylor Fravel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John David Minnich, Massachussetts Institute of Technology

Chair

• Abraham Newman Georgetown University

Discussants

• Ling Chen Johns Hopkins University

• Abraham Newman Georgetown University