Exclusive | ‘Made in China 2025’: is Beijing’s plan for hi-tech dominance as big a threat as the West thinks it is?
The ‘Made in China 2025’ plan aims to break China’s reliance on foreign technology and pull its hi-tech industries up to Western levels. But it has become a lightning rod for Washington’s ire in its trade war with Beijing. This article – the first in a series on the plan – explains how it became the centre of so much attention
Redcore was forced into a swift public climbdown, in an incident that underscored the West’s long-standing grievances over what it sees as Beijing’s strong-arm tactics for technology transfers and intellectual property theft. It was also a reality check for China on the gap it faces with the US in its quest to become a tech superpower.
Three years on, the plan has become a lightning rod in the big-power ideological rivalry between the US and China that has come out into the open with their ongoing trade war. The US, sensing a threat to its global technological dominance, has seized on the plan as an example of what it sees as unfair state intervention in China's economy.
“It’s hard to say whether the US attitude towards MIC2025 is more a perception than a realistic [take] because China’s manufacturing isn’t strong, and that’s the reality,” said Lu Jiun-wei, deputy researcher at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.
“But in the power competition from a global political perspective, the US hopes to contain the pace at which Chinese manufacturing will catch up, or even maintain and widen the gap. And this is a real strategic setting, not a perception.”
We are basically at the stage of ‘following’ … especially for [developing] core technologies, which can’t be bought and nor, if we ask for them, will people give
For China, the original idea behind MIC2025 was simply to catch up with other countries, a tall order even by its own admission.