Issue Geoeconomic limits on Korea-China cooperation in NEXT strategic technologies

Summary

Korea's government plans to build NEXT strategic technologies through public-private collaboration, aiming to become self-reliant within five years in core fields spanning chips and batteries, AI, bio and quantum, and advanced materials and future energy. These are precisely the areas where Washington and Beijing compete most fiercely, and the report expects geoeconomic conflict to constrain Korea-China cooperation because the US Foreign Direct Product Rule is likely to apply. It proposes sorting technologies into red boxes where cooperation is impossible, yellow boxes for conditional cooperation where China has bottlenecks and security risk is low, and green boxes of essential cooperation. China's lead in most NEXT fields, with Korea ahead mainly in semiconductors and partly in batteries and biopharma, is another constraint. Low trust in China is a further hurdle, and unless Korea tightens protection against leakage of core technology and intellectual property, its choices are likely to tilt toward the US.