China Accuses US Of 'paranoid Delusion' Over Bill

Beijing on Wednesday accused Washington of "paranoid delusion" after the US Senate passed a sweeping industrial policy bill aimed at countering the surging economic threat from China.

America's political parties overcame partisan divisions to support pumping more than US$170 billion into research and development, one of the most significant achievements in Congress since Joe Biden's presidency began in January.

The United States Innovation and Competition Act represents the largest investment in scientific research and technological innovation "in generations", according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

"We are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off," Biden said.

"As other countries continue to invest in their own research and development, we cannot risk falling behind."

The bill is seen as crucial for US efforts to avoid being out-manoeuvered by Beijing as the adversaries compete in the race for technological innovation.

The foreign affairs committee of China's top legislature called the bill an attempt to interfere in the country's internal affairs and deprive it of its "legitimate right to development through technology and economic decoupling", state media reported.

"The bill shows that the paranoid delusion of egoism has distorted the original intention of innovation and competition," said the National People's Congress foreign affairs committee, according to a report by the official Xinhua news agency.

It said the bill was "full of Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice".

The proposal aims to address a number of technological areas in which the United States has fallen behind its Chinese competitors.

"This is an opportunity for the United States to strike a blow on behalf of answering the unfair competition that we are seeing from communist China," said Republican Senator Roger Wicker, one of the main co-sponsors.

Whichever countries best harness technologies like AI, robotics and quantum computing will be able to shape innovation to its image, added Schumer, before criticising Chinese President Xi Jinping.

A summary of the Senate legislation notes how China is "aggressively investing over US$150 billion" in semiconductor manufacturing in order to control the advanced technology.

While the Senate's top Republican Mitch McConnell stressed that the measure remained "incomplete", it nevertheless passed by a healthy margin, highlighting how the nation's competition with China is one of the few issues that can bring feuding Republicans and Democrats together. (AFP)