Vertinsky Ilan, Kuang Yingqiu, Zhou Dongsheng, Cui Victor
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, 2053 Main Mall, Vancouver, V6T 1Z2 Canada.
Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall C425, Vancouver, V6T 1Z1 Canada.
J Int Bus Stud. 2023 Jan 31:1-27. doi: 10.1057/s41267-023-00597-z.
Employing insights from political economics, international relations, and China studies, we identify the key variables that shape the dynamics of the U.S.-China rivalry and investigate their impacts on the bifurcation and value-chain decoupling processes. We show that the ongoing conflict and disengagement processes are more likely to evolve in the long run in significantly different ways to the one envisioned by current Washington decision-makers and echoed by Petricevic and Teece (2019). The latter predicted an escalation of the disengagement processes and inevitable convergence to a 'bifurcated world'. Our main findings are: (1) The potential costs of bifurcation and consequent value-chain decoupling are prohibitive to both China and the U.S. Resistance is likely to grow by U.S.' own MNEs and allies; (2) Washington decision-makers overstate the threats that 'China's rise' poses to the survival of the liberal world order; and (3) China's techno-nationalistic threats are likely to dissipate after a period of escalation, as a result of its own resource constraints, increasing costs of key programs, and inability to sustain in the long run its rapid innovation processes due to growing central controls. We conclude the paper by outlining an approach to maintain an open global economy and secure innovation systems.
运用政治经济学、国际关系和中国研究的见解，我们确定了塑造美中竞争动态的关键变量，并研究了它们对分歧和价值链脱钩过程的影响。我们表明，从长远来看，正在进行的冲突和脱钩过程更有可能以与当前华盛顿决策者所设想并得到佩特里切维奇和蒂斯（2019年）呼应的方式截然不同地演变。后者预测脱钩过程将升级，并不可避免地走向“分裂的世界”。我们的主要发现是：（1）分歧和随之而来的价值链脱钩的潜在成本对中国和美国来说都过高。美国本土跨国公司及其盟友的抵制可能会增加；（2）华盛顿决策者夸大了“中国崛起”对自由世界秩序生存构成的威胁；（3）由于自身资源限制、关键项目成本增加以及由于中央控制加强而无法长期维持其快速创新过程，中国的技术民族主义威胁可能在一段时间的升级后消散。我们在论文结尾概述了一种维持开放全球经济和安全创新体系的方法。
