US Needs More Tools to Counter China, Congress Told
September 27, 2018 Updated: September 27, 2018
WASHINGTON—Apart from tariffs, the United States needs more tools to counter China’s aggressive efforts to acquire American intellectual property through legal and illegal means, experts told a congressional hearing on “Countering China” on Sept. 26, 2018.
“For more than 40 years, the U.S. has encouraged China to develop its own economy, and to take its place alongside with the U. S. as a central and responsible player on the world stage. But China doesn’t want to join us. They want to replace us. More importantly, China has not been playing fair,” Rep. William Hurd (R-Texas), chairman of the subcommittee on Information Technology, said in his opening remarks.
Hurd said that China coerces American companies into entering into joint ventures with Chinese companies. And the United States has suffered huge losses.
“The U.S. trade representatives, which led a seven-month investigation into China’s intellectual property (IP) theft, recently found that Chinese theft of American IP currently costs between 225 to 600 billions annually,” Hurd said.
Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who testified in the hearing, said that the world has never seen a country like China before.
“It is not a country constrained by global norms of acceptable economic and trade behavior,” Atikinson said. “It is a country where the government is concerned with one and only one economic goal: winning in advanced technology industries by any means possible.”
Atkinson recommended that the Congress should enact a regime whereby if Chinese entities seek licenses in the United States, then the Chinese enterprise must obtain a license on the same terms by which foreigners are required to license into china.
He also suggested tightening the process of issuing student visas from students coming from China and strengthening FBI-university partnerships to limit inappropriate IP transfer.
Sarah Cook, senior research analyst of Freedom House, said that China’s purpose for becoming a “cyber superpower” is to increase internet controls to ensure authoritarian longevity. It is also expanding information controls beyond China’s borders, she said.
The direct and indirect costs of internet controls are huge, and ironically, the complicit companies, which help the Chinese regime to control internet, are also important victims of the regime’s repressive measures, according to Cook.
Cook recommended that “the United States should be proactive in developing its own capabilities and upholding international free speech and privacy standards, develop a comprehensive national strategy on artificial intelligence, and dedicate diplomatic resources to upholding internet freedom.”
The United States should also fund counter censorship efforts specific to China, support groups that develop and disseminate tools to enable Chinese users on a large scale to access blocked websites and expand funding for applications that enhance access to uncensored information and digital security on mobile phone devices, Cook recommended.
Furthermore, the United States should “create an emergency fund that can be activated quickly during moments of crisis or political turmoil to rapidly enhance the server capacity of circumvention tools facing increased demand from China.”
Cook said that the China Media Bulletin project of Freedom House has been working with partners who run circumvention tools like GreatFire’s FreeBrowser or overseas Chinese outlets who gain traffic via tools like FreeGate and Ultrasurf. These channels garner millions of impressions each month and bring tens of thousands of readers from inside China, and have proven to be very effective.
Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-needs-more-tools-to-counter-china-congress-told_2673182.html
