The Boat House at Confluence Park
679 West Spring St. | Columbus, OH 43215
Speaker: Dr. Adam Segal
As one of the most heated trade wars persists, the U.S.-China science and technology relationship is being violently remade. The U.S.-China science and technology relationship is being violently remade. While a tightly linked technology system benefited the United States and China over the last two decades, there is now widespread concern on both sides of the Pacific that the security risks outweigh the gains. President Xi Jinping has accelerated policies designed to increase the innovativeness of the Chinese economy and reshape the global internet. The Trump administration has pushed back against Chinese technologies policies and threatened punitive measures if China does not cease the theft of intellectual property from American companies. After a short lull, Chinese hackers are once again targeting US technology companies, and in response, Washington has launched a new wave of indictments of Chinese hackers.
This contest brings new risks and opportunities. The end result may be two distinct technology systems, with other countries forced to choose if they are going to plug into American or Chinese technology platforms and standards.
Council on Foreign Relations
Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman chair in emerging technologies and national security and director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on security issues, technology development, and Chinese domestic and foreign policy, Segal was the project director for the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force report Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet. His book The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age (PublicAffairs, 2016) describes the increasingly contentious geopolitics of cyberspace. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He currently writes for the blog, “Net Politics.”
Before coming to CFR, Segal was an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. There, he wrote about missile defense, nuclear weapons, and Asian security issues. He has been a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has taught at Vassar College and Columbia University. Segal is the author of Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge (W.W. Norton, 2011) and Digital Dragon: High-Technology Enterprises in China (Cornell University Press, 2003), as well as several articles and book chapters on Chinese technology policy.
Segal has a BA and PhD in government from Cornell University, and an MA in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
Affiliations:
Columbia University, Adjunct
Cyber Conflict Studies Association, Board member
Stanford University, Affiliate