How the US-China trade war became a conflict over the future of tech

It may have begun as a trade war, but the US conflict with China is increasingly becoming a technology war. President Trump’s decision to confront Beijing over policies that he says discriminate against foreign companies and distort global markets has become a battle for control of advanced communications and computing technologies. That evolution is taking the transpacific conflict into sensitive realms of national security and human rights, making a quick settlement an ever more distant outcome. It is also putting at risk a wide array of US-China technology cooperation, including easy access to visas for researchers and venture capital funds for U.S. start-ups — and threatening to boomerang on US companies that China might retaliate against.