US-China tech war

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and the US Congress’ 150-odd other pieces of China-related legislation underscore elder statesman Henry Kissinger’s recent assertion that the US and China are “in the foothills” of a new cold war. Perhaps we’re even further up, above the tree line. As recriminations beget more recriminations and new fronts in the ideological battle seem to open every week, Washington’s wannabe cold warriors need to pause and reassess. The non-stop news around the advance of the Hong Kong act and the stand-off at Polytechnic University last week obscured new data released by the Institute of International Education and the State Department showing that the number o

Engineer Kuang Kaiming was assigned to a team developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology for a Shanghai start-up. The company went with two leading open-source software libraries, Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s Pytorch. The decision to adopt US core technology over Chinese alternatives was telling of China’s weakness in basic AI infrastructure.  Despite the country’s success in producing commercially successful AI companies, the open-source coding repositories used to build the technology tend to be American.  Kuang’s company, whose AI product detects abnormalities in X-rays, is by no means alone.  Nearly all small- to medium-sized Chinese AI companies rely on the US-originated o

When Trump administration officials announced on October 7 that they were banning some of China’s most feted artificial intelligence and surveillance companies from buying US technology, the move caught Chinese policymakers off guard. Back in May, the US Commerce Department cited national security concerns when it barred Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from buying US technology. In its latest move, the Trump administration banned eight companies, including China’s AI national champions SenseTime, Megvii and iFlyTek, and 20 police departments for their purported roles in the suppression of Uygur minorities in Xinjiang. It was the first time that human rights were cited as a reason fo

The videos look innocuous enough. Selfies. Stunts. Scripted comedy. cat lady in training pic.twitter.com/LKovVQYknh — TikTok (@tiktok_us) November 2, 2019 But TikTok, a rare Chinese-owned social media app that has thrived outside China, has found itself the target of a serious accusation: threatening American security. The intensifying scrutiny on the app, owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, has come amid rising suspicion in Washington of Beijing’s growing global influence. US lawmakers and critics of the Chinese government have accused the popular video-sharing app of potentially allowing China’s ruling Communist Party to exploit information about its millions of American users f

People in Changsha, the capital of the southern province of Hunan, can now have a taste of the future by hopping into a self-driving taxi. Launched by tech giant Baidu, trial passenger services started in the city on Thursday, about two years after Google’s self-driving unit Waymo started its pilot project in Phoenix, Arizona. The taxi services, involving an initial fleet of 45 autonomous cars, are expected to run initially on 31-mile-long open roads before gradually expanding to cover the entire Changsha pilot zone of 27 square miles, making it the largest trial of its kind, according to the company. “The trial operations in Changsha demonstrate that the Apollo robotaxi is progressing from

The year-long trade war has shown that the Trump administration is willing to block Chinese access to everything from software to semiconductors to nuclear technology to slow China’s rise. Nowhere is this threat more evident than in semiconductors, after the US put one of China’s top companies, Huawei Technologies, on a trade blacklist that prevents American companies like Intel and Qualcomm from selling it chips. These complex, tiny devices are critical to the function of everyday consumer electronics, communications and computing products, as well as increasingly sophisticated equipment in a range of sectors. In May 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping met the country’s top scientists and en

China has long been aware of the need to develop a strong semiconductor industry of its own. The recent trade war with the US, which threatens to cut off critical access to US components for national tech champions, has added extra urgency. What many people might not be aware of is that China was close to the US in the 1960s when it came to early semiconductor technology – so close that it had a fighting chance of leading the industry. However, a combination of political upheaval and misguided industrial strategy has meant that after decades of effort, China still lags. The story of China’s chip efforts goes back to the beginnings of the integrated circuit (IC). The IC, a collection of elect

As US-China tension threatens to sever the access that Chinese firms have to foreign know-how and markets, Huawei Technologies is racing to develop its own technology – by writing fat paychecks. The Shenzhen-based telecommunications equipment giant is prepared to pay successful candidates at least five times what their peers are making, Huawei said in a recruitment post on its WeChat account. Having the talent to develop proprietary technology has taken on increasing strategic importance for Chinese companies amid America's and China’s competition for supremacy in advanced technologies. Huawei is looking for people “who have made extraordinary achievements in mathematics, computer science, p

Once upon a time, American companies could cherry-pick the top Chinese talent from US universities, promising big money, generous benefits and the chance to work at industry leaders. Those days seem to be over. Today, talented young graduates – who desire more than just a cushy life – want jobs with China’s cutting-edge technology companies. “What I look for in a job is not money. My parents are not counting on me to support them,” said Ben Zhang, who turned down a sought-after job offer from a Boeing subsidiary in the US after getting a master’s degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Instead, he returned to Beijing in 2018. Zhang, 28, now works as a produ

China's facial recognition tech firms are considered among the world's best. Now they're at the center of a new front potentially opening up in the escalating tech war between the United States and China. It revolves around the Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT), an influential US government accuracy test. Widely considered the gold standard for determining the reliability of facial recognition software, FRVT results are regularly cited by companies as a measure of their credibility, and referred to by businesses and policymakers when buying the tech. Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii is pushing to ban countries, including China, from the FRVT. The proposed “End Support of Digital A