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They call it the Trump effect.

Increased government scrutiny of Chinese investments in Silicon Valley has meant some deals are not getting done. Some aren’t even considered.

Usually eager for money and tantalized by the prospect of the Chinese market, startups are even declining Chinese investment.

After years of growing ties between China and Silicon Valley, the U.S. tech capital sees itself caught between Beijing and Washington over which country will win the competition to create the next generation of communication technologies.

“China’s innovation efforts are broad and deep,” said Michael Wessel, commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, at a recent congressional hearing. “China wants to be a global innovation leader and is doing all that it can legally and illegally to achieve its goals.”

​Flashpoint Huawei

Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company that is building a 5G network in countries around the world, remains a flashpoint. Its chief financial officer faces extradition to the United States from Canada on fraud charges.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, U.S. and Huawei officials lobbied world leaders on whether Huawei should be trusted.

U.S. concerns about China and technology extend to the nation’s methods to achieve technology dominance, as outlined in Beijing’s Made in China 2025 plan.

In addition to subsidies for industry, and research and development, the U.S. says those methods include massive cyberhacking campaigns to steal corporate secrets, forced technology transfers to Chinese partners, and government policies that reward intellectual property theft.

WATCH: Silicon Valley Skeptical of Washington’s China Concerns

Increased scrutiny of Chinese investors

The U.S. government wants new barriers up because it believes some technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, are important to national security. But many in the tech industry see risks in new restrictions.

“By not working with China, not only do we have less access to information to what they are doing,” said Parag Khanna, author of “The Future Is Asian.” They will substitute us for more reliable partners and we will be cut out of the entire market.”

Tim Draper is a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who says he was the first U.S. venture capitalist to invest in Baidu, the Chinese technology firm.

“I think we should be open and sharing,” he said. “Both countries benefit so much by having a very open communication lane there. … I believe we have a problem that we are putting up barriers where they don’t benefit us.”

The race to build 5G

Chinese companies are racing to build 5G wireless communication networks around the world, which Washington says risks giving Beijing enormous opportunities for electronic surveillance.

The stakes make it hard to predict how the U.S. and China will come to an understanding. In the meantime, Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs have accepted for now a cooling-off period for cross-border investment.

The disconnect between Silicon Valley and Washington is hard to bridge, said Christian Brose, head of strategy at Anduril Industries, a Southern California tech company that works with the U.S. government.

“When you have a conversation where one party sees China as an emerging national security challenge, and the other sees it as an emerging business opportunity, that’s just a fundamental clash of cultures and expectations that is difficult to reconcile, but I also think it’s not impossible,” he added.

While the two countries negotiate, Silicon Valley, caught in the middle, waits.
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America’s newest capsule for astronauts rocketed Saturday toward the International Space Station on a high-stakes test flight by SpaceX.

The only passenger was a life-size test dummy, named Ripley after the lead character in the “Alien” movies. SpaceX needs to nail the debut of its crew Dragon capsule before putting people on board later this year.

This latest, flashiest Dragon is on a fast track to reach the space station Sunday morning, just 27 hours after liftoff.

Five day round trip

It will spend five days docked to the orbiting outpost, before making a retro-style splashdown in the Atlantic next Friday — all vital training for the next space demo, possibly this summer, when two astronauts strap in.

“This is critically important … We’re on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil again for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. He got a special tour of the pad on the eve of launch, by SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk.

An estimated 5,000 NASA and contractor employees, tourists and journalists gathered in the wee hours at Kennedy Space Center with the SpaceX launch team, as the Falcon 9 rocket blasted off before dawn from the same spot where Apollo moon rockets and space shuttles once soared. Across the country at SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, company employees went wild, cheering every step of the way until the capsule successfully reached orbit.

Looking on from Kennedy’s Launch Control were the two NASA astronauts who will strap in as early as July for the second space demo, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken. It’s been eight years since Hurley and three other astronauts flew the last space shuttle mission, and human launches from Florida ceased.

Private companies

NASA turned to private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, and has provided them $8 billion to build and operate crew capsules to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. Now Russian rockets are the only way to get astronauts to the 250-mile-high outpost. Soyuz tickets have skyrocketed over the years; NASA currently pays $82 million per seat.

Boeing aims to conduct the first test flight of its Starliner capsule in April, with astronauts on board possibly in August.

Bridenstine said he’s confident that astronauts will soar on a Dragon or Starliner, or both, by year’s end. But he stressed there’s no rush.

“We are not in a space race,” he said. “That race is over. We went to the moon and we won. It’s done. Now we’re in a position where we can take our time and make sure we get it right.”
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White House officials are worried that unless more American students study math and science the United States won’t be able to compete with China, India and other nations. The U.S. administration has just published a five-year plan to boost the number of kids who go into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM subjects. VOA’s Sahar Majid has more in this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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