Cutting off ties to Chinese tech, talent hurts America: opinion piece

BEIJING, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- Cutting off ties to Chinese tech and talent will stifle American industry, a recent opinion piece published by Newsweek has said.

"China already has decisive advantages in critical data and their application to Artificial Intelligence, making it hard for American researchers to eschew collaboration with China in key fields like medical research and industrial automation," said the article.

China now graduates more engineers and computer scientists than the rest of the world combined, and it is hard to conduct AI research without Chinese researchers, it said.

Chinese schools are close to par with the United States in quality, having all but caught up in the last ten years, it added.

Noting that "American R&D depends on foreign students, and a lot of them will be Chinese," the author said, "The idea of quarantining China gets easy applause, but we won't reverse our long-term productivity decline without Chinese talent, data, and technology."

The author called on the United States to "strike a balance between safeguarding national security and cutting off access to indispensable data, talent, and state-of-the-art practice."