World News Kims_flying_presents • 1 week ago • 100%

> Global and country findings - **China’s lead continues to grow** - **China significantly strengthened its standing in the middle of the last decade** - The US is losing the strong historical advantage that it has built - **China has built up potential monopoly positions in scientific expertise and top performing institutions** - India accelerates: India now ranks in the top 5 countries for 45 of 64 technologies - The UK ranks in the top 5 countries for 36 technologies—a decline from 44 technologies in last year’s results - The European Union, as a whole, is a competitive technological player - Germany is the top-performing European Union country - South Korea’s performance shows that Japan has work to do - Iran excels at defence-sensitive technologies - Australia has improved in some technologies and slipped in others - AUKUS—the trilateral security and technology partnership involving the US, the UK and Australia28—closes the gap in some Pillar 2–relevant technologies, but not all > Technology monopoly risk metric results - **Scientific breakthroughs and research innovations in key defence technologies are increasingly likely to occur in China:** - **China’s research lead in advanced materials and manufacturing technologies grows** > Institutional findings: US tech companies, government agencies and CAS - Private-sector research is increasingly concentrated in US technology giants - Private sector research was more diverse between 2003-2007 - **The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is the global science and research powerhouse** - Government agencies and national laboratories feature prominently - Chinese companies play a relatively small role in the global research ecosystem

World News Kims_flying_presents • 2 months ago • 87%

#### June 23, 2024 > European officials have largely been in favor of investments from Chinese battery makers such as CATL and from Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers such as BYD in Hungary and Chery Automobile in Spain. > While Chinese purchases of existing European businesses have collapsed in recent years, in part because of growing European scrutiny, greenfield investment—i.e. newly created companies or plants—has risen rapidly, reaching 78% of all Chinese foreign direct investment in Europe last year, according to data compiled by the Mercator Institute for China Studies and Rhodium Group. > At the core of this strategy is a fear that Europe, and especially Germany, which relies much more on manufacturing than the U.S., could be hit by one of two nightmare scenarios: a global trade war, or a new flood of cheap Chinese imports. > European Union regulators this month signaled plans to impose relatively modest tariffs—the highest will be half the 100% recently announced by President Biden—on Chinese auto imports. Some analysts saw this as an implicit encouragement to Chinese producers to shift auto factories to Europe instead, which some have started doing. > For both Europe and China, closer cooperation would hedge against a return to the White House by Donald Trump, who is pledging 10% across-the-board tariffs on imports. That threat argues against Europe fully throwing in its lot with the U.S., while encouraging China to smooth over tensions with Europe and maintain access to its lucrative market. > If so, Europe’s industrial and technological ties to China could strengthen as the U.S.’s weaken. And Chinese car brands will play an increasingly important role in Europe, but no role in the U.S. > The EU’s approach “accepts that the China-EU industrial complex exists and is explicitly trying to encourage more of it,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics. > This poses risks for Europe, said Noah Barkin, Europe-China expert at Rhodium: “If the European car industry remains deeply integrated with China and the U.S. industry is completely decoupled from China, that is likely to lead to bilateral tensions between the EU and U.S.” Indeed, Europe exports twice as much to the U.S. as it does to China. > Moreover, Europe has more to lose than the U.S. from a breakdown in global trade. It has 2½ times as many manufacturing jobs, and more than a third of its manufactured goods are exported, versus one-fifth for the U.S., former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi said in a speech this month. > Manufacturing comprises 15% of Europe’s overall output, and 18% of Germany’s, compared with 11% of the U.S. [...] > China once welcomed foreign investment as a way to import new technology. Now, said Barkin, “We are in a position where Europe is keen for transfers of technology to flow in the other direction.” > China is likely to produce seven million battery-powered EVs this year, up from five million last year, said Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, a German auto industry expert. Europe is likely to produce 1.2 million this year, down from 1.5 million last year, he said. This advantage of scale enabled Chinese manufacturers to move ahead of international competitors in technology for electric vehicles, including batteries. > Allowing Chinese manufacturers to grow in Europe could help European manufacturers by encouraging more people to switch to EVs, and governments to build charging infrastructure, some analysts say. Another advantage: The U.S. electric-vehicle market could lag behind Europe and China’s, with inferior technology and higher prices.

World News Kims_flying_presents • 2 months ago • 98%

#### July 7, 2024 > **China is outspending the U.S.,** completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies. > Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially **around the clock, to complete fusion projects**. And the Asian superpower has **10 times as many Ph.D.sin fusion science and engineering as the U.S. ** > JP Allain, who heads the Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, said **China is spending around $1.5 billion a year on fusion, nearly twice the U.S. government’s fusion budget.** What’s more, China appears to be following a program similar to the road map that hundreds of U.S. fusion scientists and engineers first published in 2020 in hopes of making commercial fusion energy. > “**They’re building our long-range plan**,” Allain said. “That’s very frustrating, as you can imagine.” > **Scientists familiar with China’s fusion facilities said that if it continues its current pace of spending and development, it will surpass the U.S. and Europe’s magnetic fusion capabilities in three or four years.** > China already has a fast-growing nuclear-technology industry and is **building more conventional nuclear power plants than any other country**. The country’s nuclear-plant development will give it an advantage when commercial fusion is reached, according to a report released last month by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank with backers that include big tech companies. > The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Plasma Physics in the eastern Chinese city of Hefei in 2018 broke ground on a nearly 100-acre magnetic fusion research and technology campus. **The facility is expected to be completed next year but is already largely operational and focused on industrializing the technology**. > Late last year, China said it would form a **new national fusion company**, and said the state-owned Chinese National Nuclear Corp. would lead **a consortium of state-owned industrial firms and universities pursuing fusion energy.** Among the largest efforts by a private Chinese company are those of ENN, an energy conglomerate, which created a fusion division from scratch in 2018. > Since then, ENN has **built two tokamaks**, the machines where fusion can happen, using powerful magnets to hold plasma. ENN’s fusion work **isn’t well-understood outside of China and its pace of development would be difficult to replicate in the U.S. or Europe**. > Tammy Ma, lead for the Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, said **the U.S. fusion budget of $790 million for the 2024 fiscal year, a 4% increase from the year prior, hasn’t been enough to keep pace with inflation**. The sluggish growth has meant fewer research grants and grant-funded positions available in U.S. graduate schools, Ma said. > The fusion world is full of frenemies who believe their technology and approach is the best to meet the world’s energy needs. Most are collegial competitors with partnerships that spiderweb the globe. But cooperation has been complicated by the increasingly adversarial relationship between China and the West, especially the U.S. >**China for decades has invested in raw materials and technologies that are key to the low-carbon transition. Many of those are also used by fusion firms and researchers, including powerful magnets to hold plasmas in place and lithium, which can be used as a blanket layer around a fusion reactor to absorb neutrons produced in plasmas, among other technologies.** >Chinese scientists participate in international fusion conferences and seem most comfortable sharing information through direct conversations, other scientists say, though language is an obstacle. >U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat and co-chair of Congress’s Fusion Energy Caucus, said that **much U.S. fusion spending goes to legacy programs**, “not the cutting-edge stuff.” > “In China, from what we can tell, most of their billion and a half is actually going to build stuff that would compete with Helion or Commonwealth Fusion,” Beyer said, referring to two of the largest private fusion firms in the U.S. > For decades, China had “almost nothing” of a fusion program, said Dennis Whyte, a professor of engineering at MIT, who for several years sat on Chinese fusion advisory committees.** It took China about 10 years to build a world-class fusion science program and national labs**. > “It was almost like a flash that they were able to get there,” Whyte said. “Don’t underestimate their capabilities about coming up to speed.” > “It’s not clear to me who will win,” he [U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat and co-chair of Congress’s Fusion Energy Caucus] said.