Foreign media reported that U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas pointed out at a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Economic Policy Subcommittee last Wednesday (16) that the economic issues between the United States and China are a struggle for dominance in the high-tech sector and a struggle to determine the importance of the U.S. presence.
Derek Scissors, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), also said at the hearing that China faces an aging population, high debt and policies that impede innovation and rural development, which will lead to a downward spiral of economic competitiveness. In contrast, the U.S. is more innovative than China in general, and its demographics are getting younger, so the economic challenge from China is a short-term threat that will last about a decade.
According to the United Nations, China will lose 200 million people in the labor force and add 300 million new elderly people in the next 30 years. The China of 2040 will be a completely new China, both in terms of demographics and social structure.
The extent to which aging is a drag on the economy will be difficult to offset by innovation, and the lack of innovative Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which account for more than 20 of China’s key industries and have debts of more than $20 trillion, will be an impediment to economic development.
As for the development of strategic technologies that are critical to national security and economic development, Matthew Turpin, a professor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, argues that the United States and China have never been on the same page in many strategic technology areas. The United States and its allies have actively denied China access to technological details in high-technology fields for decades in a variety of ways.
Turpin pointed out that despite China’s huge investment in fostering the semiconductor industry, there is at least a two-generation technology gap with the U.S. Boeing alone produces 50 to 60 Boeing 737 airliners in a single month, while Chinese commercial aircraft have produced only 38 Xianfeng airliners in the past five years, with frequent mechanical failures, because China does not have access to the design and manufacturing details of advanced turbojet engines and flight control systems, and aircraft engine manufacturers such as General Electric, Pratt & Whitney and Safran are unwilling to be forced to share core manufacturing technologies in order to enter the Chinese market.
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