Why do we spread knowledge across nations? We have access to lots of knowledge on paper sharing platforms, open course platforms, open-source platforms and question asking platforms and etc, and Tesla opened all its electric car patents in 2014 starting from which year XPeng and FF and many others in China and other countries were founded.
I don't know why we are not afraid of the backfires of knowledge sharing or the late-mover advantage? Does a company need the often mentioned technical barrier to be competitive? In China there was a saying &quot;师夷长技以制夷&quot; which means literally &quot;learn from foreigners to compete with them&quot;, then I thought those platforms are very dangerous to be utilized by enemies/competitors.
I am sorry if I asked this in the wrong place again(if so, please kindly let me know where I can post this question). I asked this question somewhere else on StackExchange and somebody suggested that I should consider comparative advantage and I learned the term here but cannot still get my head around how to answer my question using that. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
This is a long comment that is too long for the comment box.
In fact, many research projects in US are secretive, especially the ones related to military. At the same time, much, much more research projects in China are secretive, including some agricultural ones, which are not military-related but considered as national security-related by Chinese government.
There has always been a China-threat theory in US, and a US-threat theory in China. The majority of US military are nationalists which could be considered as right-wing, while the majority of US academia are left-wing globalists who think China is less threatening. So the later care more about free-market and free knowledge while the former might want to put some restrictions on China.
By the way, there is a culture difference on &quot;world order&quot; between the East and the West. For thousands of years, the Western world is comprised of hundreds of smaller yet independent states, while almost all of the Far East nations could have been a tributary subject of the &quot;Center Empire&quot;. People from the &quot;Center Empire&quot; could naturally believe that there will be only one major leader in the world, while the westerners might believe that the world is consist of many equal entities. The latter is of course less concern about knowledge-sharing.
The globalists believe that the global challenges faced by all human are more threatening than China. This could be one of reasons why the globalists have gained more support in the special year of 2020.