President Joe Biden‘s administration just agreed to a five-year extension to the science and technology sharing agreement with China. Established by President Jimmy Carter, the agreement has attracted increasing scrutiny in recent years because of China’s endemic use of U.S. scientific knowledge to bolster its military and intelligence services.
Biden has made a bad decision by extending this agreement.
The main problem here is that China views its access to U.S. science and technology through the fixed prism of one key interest: specifically, how that knowledge can be employed to boost the power of the Chinese Communist Party. And that includes Beijing’s key concern of increasing China’s military power. China has used this agreement to manipulate otherwise civilian technologies for military and other nefarious purposes. While the State Department insists this extension…
