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The battle for technological leadership between the world's two majors powers will undoubtedly be fierce. The clearest case in this respect was that of Huawei -the Chinese giant telecom equipment company- which was banned from the US territory. The reason put forward by the American authorities was the risk of backdoors sabotage. But the real issue here was to do everything possible to avoid relying on foreign technology. Indeed, the key question for the US administration is how to maintain America's global supremacy in innovation and technology. For their part, the Chinese authorities have clearly set themselves the target of becoming the world's leading technological power within the next 5 years. China has adopted the "China 2025" plan which aims to support key technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics. The fact is that this plan is shrouding the real agenda which is to exclude from the Chinese market all the Western companies that offer competitive technology. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that China has made tremendous progress in recent years in the technological innovation sector. Here are a few striking facts. China is now training more engineers than all the OECD countries put together. Expenditures on research for the last 10 years rose by 900% (Re.We demain). Everyone can see the increasing power of the Chinese digital industry and companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi are already global leaders of this industry. However, US companies like Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook are still the largest companies in the world in terms of valuation (Re.Bloomberg). But for how long? Finally, we must not forget that countries which are leaders in the industries of the future are also among those which develop the most synergies between civil and defense research. This explains the degree of determination of both camps to ensure an exclusive control over new technologies.

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