The tension between China and 'the West' over China's advancing technological edge is fairly amusing - since China's technological advances were largely brought

The tension between China and 'the West' over China's advancing technological edge is fairly amusing - since China's technological advances were largely brought about by the USA's neoliberal economic program, which involved shipping a whole lot of technology to China in order to take advantage of the cheap labor and boost profits for American investors. I really can't think of any instance in industrial history where a leading power just gave away their core technology. America had to steal textile technology from Britain (see the great book 'Smuggler Nation' (2013, Peter Andreas) [1] on that); Britain and France had to steal chemical technology from Germany (after WWI, that was a significant cause of tension as the British and French raided German manufacturing centers for blueprints and recipes) - but with China, the USA's financial oligarchs just gave them the factories because they wanted to destroy domestic unions and thereby raise their profit margins. All these efforts to use intellectual property and espionage laws to roll it all back are doomed to failure, it's a classic case of trying to close the barn door after all the animals have escaped. Not only that, a knock-on effect is that the decades of lowered investment in domestic manufacturing infrastructure in the USA, has put the entire country in a backwards position (note how we can't even maintain our aging rail network, let alone build high-speed rail networks like China has). If you want someone to blame, the architects and champions of neoliberal trade policies and the financialization of the US economy are the ones responsible for this debacle. [1] https://harpers.org/archive/2013/02/smuggler-nation/ https://harpers.org/archive/2013/02/smuggler-nation/