China

Four contributors to the recent book China's Quest for Foreign Technology: Beyond Espionage discuss China’s foreign technology acquisition. Is it nefarious, or just typical behavior of an upwardly mobile nation? Is the myth of a stateless global society dead? And why does such a pressing issue seem invisible in the West?

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After a string of questionable cases and poorly managed prosecutions, the incoming Biden administration should reform and rebuild the Justice Department’s program for countering Chinese economic espionage to embody the highest values of the U.S. justice system.

Jose Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente, an independent researcher who runs the blog nintil.com, complicates our previous week's ChinaTalk on U.S. industrial policy with Rob Atkinson. We discuss whether the state invented the iPhone, if the trends of history are pointing Taiwan’s direction, why the way we fund science is broken, what mass conversions to Mormonism would mean for the American economy and, if you stick around to the end, how to live forever.

The United States’s track record in responding to the coronavirus pandemic has been awful. Yet the success of its vaccine development efforts shows that when it comes to biotechnology, the U.S. outpaces China and other rivals.