Washington, DC – China has leveraged a wide range of government powers in an attempt to dominate key technology areas, and the United States must do more both to understand the scope of this effort and respond to it, CSET Director Dewey Murdick said in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today. 

At a hearing titled “Countering the People’s Republic of China’s Economic and Technological Plan for Dominance,” Murdick discussed China’s awareness of its technological strengths and deficits and its strategy to move towards self-sufficiency in key technologies.

“China gaining advantages in any of these technologies, be it artificial intelligence, semiconductors, genome editing, or quantum technologies, would have implications for global security — and potentially, U.S. intelligence community operations,” he said.

Murdick noted that China’s efforts to collect information on the science and technology achievements of other countries have “enjoyed massive, multi-layered and sustained state support,” while no scalable countermeasure effort exists in the United States. 

“This analytic gap directly affects national security and economic competitiveness,” he said. “And it undermines the country’s ability to make informed technology-related decisions.”

Murdick made the case for the U.S. government to establish an analytic capability that sits apart from the intelligence community and uses unclassified sources to monitor global developments in emerging technologies.

Murdick’s full testimony is available HERE.

Founded in early 2019, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University produces data-driven research at the intersection of security and technology, providing nonpartisan analysis to the policy community.