When competitively propositioned, reconciling considerations of “national security” and the calculus of “economic opportunity” is tough even in the best of times.

The United States in particular and the ‘West’ in general are waking-up to the grimacing but glaring reality, that, while they still continue to be gold-standards in fundamental technological advent and procreating innovation, China has incontrovertibly snuck up, as a cost effective and quality competitive exponent of pioneering vent, in engendering technology-driven solutions-based applications for quantum-leaps in industrial growth and societal quality of life.

When the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization unveiled its annual roll-call of sovereign patents filing for 2019, the dint of China eclipsing the US at the apogee, the first such occurrence since inception of the pecking-order back in 1979, marked a harbinger of the inevitable changing of the guard.

And what’s got the US’ goat since, is Beijing’s ambitious push to amplify the resonance of its ever burgeoning technological critical-mass and ecosystem, most notably through path-breaking initiatives, such as its digitalized currency for global legal tender; a free port trade and economic zone off Hainan island; and the endeavour to shape rule of technical standards by 2035, all of which portends to mount an existential challenge to US hegemony, and its visage of the architecture and mechanics of global governance.

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Far from attaining its core objectives, the US actions may only have served to accelerate the process of Chinese autonomization of tech-intermediates production, and a pertinacious push for data localization, which appears to be receiving a thumbs-up from US investors, hardly disabused from betting big on Beijing.

The White House’s penchant for delirious and flailing actions, witnessed in the blacklisting of ZTE and the shuttering proscription of Huawei, the executive actions for torpedoing sourcing of integrated circuit networks from US and allied country manufacturers, the foreclosure delisting of Chinese tech-firms indexed on the NYSE in order to snap equity and venture funding, and banning Chinese tech-apps with a view to crippling valuations and shielding sensitive technologies from being accessed, are more reflective of a nation and an eco-system spooked, than one that’s gearing-up for what portends to be enduring competition.

No wonder then even the US’ traditional allies and partners have perceived Chinese tech firms as worthy interlocutors in productive harnessing of the entire spectrum of the internet-of-things, artificial intelligence and quantum computing applications.

Notwithstanding the intense intertwining of trade based manufacturing and the ingresses into services sector driven by knowledge economy, it is the predatory technology-control realm in terms of data-repository and attendant flows, innovation temper, and strategic command over production and supply logistics of critical technological intermediates, that has emerged as the sharpest instrument of all-permeating national power and consequently the most iconic and trenchant axis of US-China competition for the foreseeable future.

This is the time when the US acknowledges albeit grudgingly, that the Chinese strategic peer-parity ascent is more when, than if. Hence it is no surprise that the latest frontlines are drawn between the gambit of Washington’s “Clean Data Initiative” and the virtues of Beijing’s “Data Security Initiative” in the wake of the former’s techno-nationalist attempts to quash Chinese tech-entities and attendant socialisation apps and platforms.

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That the US actions look facetiousness in the wake of the pandemic is written large. Timing matters and it behoves to ask that, with Chinese tech firms subject to a litany of allegations for a long time prior to the pandemic, what necessarily changed since, to invite such rambunctious measures, which, in the enmeshing world of technological interaction, can leave no one insulated but everyone singed by its radiating fallout?

Is it simply cynical opportunism on the part of the White House, which heading into re-election, needs to vilify Beijing to cover its own ham-handed tracks at handling the raging pandemic back home? Is Washington grumpy about the fact that the power gap appears to have considerably shrunk in material and perception terms, as Beijing manoeuvres itself out of the pandemic and makes deployment of marquee technologies a prominent and efficacious lever in accomplishing the same?

Far from attaining its core objectives, the US actions may only have served to accelerate the process of Chinese autonomization of tech-intermediates production, and a pertinacious push for data localization, which appears to be receiving a thumbs-up from US investors, hardly disabused from betting big on Beijing.

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If shielding the eroding competitive edge of US companies was at hand, it could hardly be realized by harking back to an autarkic world of operation, at a time when the Chinese market is coveted by headline US technological entities.

Yet a full-on rip-up of the internet or a mutually exclusive configuration of the technological realm in products, processes and platforms, would only drag down global growth, hurt domain businesses all around, and denude the competitiveness of economies all and sundry.

The author is assistant professor of international relations and strategic studies at the School of International and Area Studies, Goa University, Goa, India.