Abstract:

[Purpose/Significance] Science and technology have emerged as pivotal domains of competition between China and the United States. This article provides a quantitative analysis of US technology think tanks reports on the electronic information research and industry, with a focus on the evolution of themes and topics over the past decade. This analysis not only reflects their technological priorities but also maps their analytical focus on China, providing decision-making support for China's think tanks development and strategic response. [Method/Process] Based on the "2020 Global Go to Think Tank Index Report" released by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (TTCSP) at the University of Pennsylvania, considering factors such as think tank authority, research topic relevance, and research continuity, we collected a total of 1 360 reports on the electronic information research and industry published between 2015 and 2024 by 8 leading US technology think tanks. Topic analysis was conducted with BERTopic, a topic modeling tool based on Transformer embeddings. The methodology involved several key steps. First, text cleaning was performed using NLTK tools; then, the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model was employed to generate high-dimensional document embedding vectors. Subsequently, dimensionality reduction was achieved through the UMAP algorithm, followed by density clustering using the HDBSCAN algorithm. Finally, topic words were extracted based on the c-TF-IDF algorithm. [Results/Conclusions] The research identified 31 distinct research themes, of which 6 were directly related to China, specifically: global semiconductor industry competition, Sino-US digital policies and cloud computing competition, 5G network and technology competition, Chinese AI investment, Sino-US science and innovation policies, and Sino-US military technology competition. These 31 research themes were hierarchically clustered using HDBSCAN and could be categorized into 11 major research directions. The US technology think tanks persistently focused on 11 major research directions, which were largely concentrated on key areas of electronic information research and industry, such as semiconductors and microelectronics, artificial intelligence, wireless communication, quantum information technology, network security, and big data. The evolutionary trends across these research directions were generally consistent, with military technology and network security receiving the highest level of attention. The attention attached to China has undergone a significant strategic shift over the years, with drastic increase in semiconductor export control, AI technology and Sino-US digital competition. Based on the identified key themes and topic words, it is highly recommended to establish an evolutionary mapping of China-related topics and to develop a dynamic monitoring and early warning mechanism for technology issues concerning China. Future research could incorporate larger-scale corpus resources and more advanced large language models to continuously optimize topic modeling effectiveness.

Key words: US technology think tanks, electronic information research and industry, BERTopic, topic mining, Sino-US tech race