New alliance against
The Donald Trump administration’s trade war against China, occasioned by anxiety over the latter’s scientific and technological advances, is set to
deepen in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
IN LATE MAY, PRIME MINISTER BORIS Johnson of the United Kingdom floated the idea of creating a new international platform—d10, or Democracy 10 alliance. The D10 is to comprise the Group of Seven (G7) states and three others; it will be discussed formally at the G7 meeting in June. The proposed members of the alliance are the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.), along with Australia, India and South Korea. The purpose of this alliance is not entirely for mutual benefit. The agenda, Boris Johnson suggests, is to attack China.
Many of the states in the D10 have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of them (notably the U.K. and the U.S.) have started to blame China—rather than their own incompetence and the evisceration of their public health systems—for the high death toll. President Donald Trump of the U.S. has been most vocal in his diversion of blame on China, which he says, without evidence, suppressed information about the virus and perhaps even created the virus. These inflammatory statements from Trump and Johnson have provided a way for them to ignore the fact that they had both made no preparations since the World Health Organisation (WHO) first publicly warned about the virus in early January. Trump, in a fit of pique, stopped U.S. funds for the WHO and has now withdrawn the U.S. from the WHO entirely. He, like Johnson, points his finger at Beijing and does not acknowledge any failure by his government for the catastrophic deaths in the U.S.
Western anxiety about China’s growth is not because it is the centre of global manufacturing. It is perfectly acceptable to Western capitalist firms that China is the factory of the world, and that literate, well-fed and healthy Chinese workers produce iphones and refrigerators for the world market. The fact that so many factories are located in China and that China’s growth rate dwarfs that of other countries are in itself not objectionable to the Western world. What annoys them is that China has much greater ambitions than merely delivering workers to global capitalism. In April, the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) reported that for the first time in 40 years, China had applied for more patent applications than the U.S. The WIPO said in its report that China’s intellectual property applications increased by 200 per cent in 20 years. Francis Gurry, Director General of WIPO since 2008, has followed China’s “deliberate strategy” to “advance innovation and to make the country a country that operates at a higher level of value.” “It is working”, Gurry said, “and intellectual property is certainly part of that strategy.”
China’s 58,990 patent applications last year come in a wide range of scientific endeavours, including artificial intelligence, brain science, dark matter, genetic engineering and quantum computing and communications. These are areas at the cutting edge of science. Many of them will have important technological implications, which, if they work, could catapult Chinese industry to a position of considerable strength against any other industrial sector in the world.
5G AND HUAWEI
The trade war that Trump’s administration prosecuted against China from July 2018—and which he has now deepened—was occasioned by the anxiety over China’s