China, US and the Welcome Battle for Innovation Breakthroughs

Anyone familiar with endogenous growth model (such as the Romer model) will be aware that more scientists/engineers working on generating new ideas is good for everybody. This is due to the nonrivalrous nature of ideas. We don't really care if the next breakthrough cancer drug comes from China or from the US, as long as we all have access to it. As Stanford economist Charles Jones noted:
http://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/JonesHandbook2005.pdf
"Ideas can be thought of as instructions or recipes, things that can be codified in a bit-string as a sequence of ones and zeros. Objects are all the rivalrous goods we are familiar with: capital, labor, out- put, computers, automobiles, and most fundamentally the elemental atoms that make up these goods. At some level, ideas are instructions for arranging the atoms and for using the arrangements to produce utility. For thousands of years, silicon dioxide provided utility mainly as sand on the beach, but now it delivers utility through the myriad of goods that depend on computer chips. Viewed this way, economic growth can be sustained even in the presence of a finite collection of raw materials as we discover bet- ter ways to arrange atoms and better ways to use the arrangements."

 

Here is an interesting example from the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/30/chinas-9-billion-effort-to-beat-the-u-s-in-genetic-testing/