The Domestic Origins of U.S. Tech Competition Strategy toward China: A Process-Tracing Study Based on U.S.-China Artificial Intelligence Strategy

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Since the Industrial Revolution, science and technology have exerted an increasingly profound influence on international relations and the global order. In the leadership competition with China over emerging technologies, the United States has been shaped by the systemic precondition of technological dominance. Emerging technologies, as the influence factor, have been subject to securitization and mobilization through domestic discourse construction, which in turn informs the result orientation at the systemic level, national foreign policy choices such as pursuing unilateral political competition and building allied security communities, thereby intensifying international technological competition with China. This paper, taking the artificial intelligence development strategies of both Trump administrations and the Biden administration as empirical cases, examines the causal logic of international competition in emerging technologies. Preemptively responding to the technological leadership competition, the United States has securitized and mobilized AI technologies domestically, and subsequently strengthened its technological competition with China at the international level through its alliance system. China’s various countermeasures further intensified U.S.