Roger Hart (NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology; Professor of History, Texas Southern University), "China, the U.S., and the Global Race for Quantum Supremacy"
“China’s rise is the story of the century in science,” Nature Index declared in 2018. China is now competitive with the U.S. in many fields, including 5G, high-speed rail, renewable
energy, artificial intelligence, robotics, supercomputing, nanotechnology, space, and quantum technologies. This presentation focuses on the Second Quantum Revolution, arguably the most important revolution of the twenty-first century, and in particular quantum communication, an area in which China is currently ahead. In 2017 Dr. Jianwei PAN 潘建伟 of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) created the first quantum-encrypted intercontinental video conference using a Chinese satellite called Micius; China currently has the most developed quantum communications network. For the Chinese context, I will analyze the imperative of secure communications, state-sponsored science, state-strengthening, and global circulations of Chinese scientists. For the U.S. context, I will focus on the relation between science and defense, especially the legacy of the Cold War: DARPA and defense funding of science; NSA surveillance (from PRISM to tapping telecommunications cables in Denmark); and free-market ideologies (venture-capital, Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum, and the “valley of death”). My working hypothesis is that U.S. Cold War strengths have become twenty-first century liabilities, with the result that the U.S. will likely cede the economic and technological windfall of quantum communication technologies to China. To summarize in one sentence: my overall project will trace the global circulation of science from European philosophical debates over quantum mechanics to China’s quantum internet; as part of this project, this paper outlines a preliminary explanation for how the U.S. lost its early lead in the development of the quantum internet to China.
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