Introduction to the Special Section on Making Sense of the US–China “Tech War”

Abstract US and Chinese policies are increasingly promoting forms of “great-power competition”, with technologies playing a significant role in this. The resulting US–China “tech war” has become a topic of interest to International Relations (IR) literature. Yet, the current state of the art remains limited to either analyses building on (neo-)realist forms of theorizing or empirical-focused policy reports without conceptual–theoretical ambition. The contributions to this Special Section add to IR scholarship of the US–China tech war by addressing its conditions of possibility, how technology is constructed as a threat, and offering comparisons to historical precedents.