The path to power is to build new networks rather than disrupt old ones. Economists are debating when the Chinese will have the largest gross domestic product in the world – perhaps by the end of this decade – and whether they can achieve their other two major national goals: building the most powerful army in the world and the race for key technologies against 2049, the 100th anniversary of Mao’s revolution.
They may not stem from their relatively small nuclear arsenal or their growing stockpile of conventional weapons. Instead, it stems from their growing economic power and how they use their government grant technology to wire countries in Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe, with 5G wireless networks meant to how to bind closer to Beijing. It comes from the submarine cables that coil them around the world, so the networks work on Chinese-owned circuits.
Ultimately, it will come from how they use the networks to make other countries dependent on Chinese technology. Once that happens, the Chinese can carry out some of their authoritarianism by, for example, selling face recognition software to other countries that has enabled them to combat their differences of opinion at home.
That’s why Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to Mr. Biden, who was with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken for the meeting with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage, has warned in a series of writings over the past few years that it may be a mistake to assume that China plans to to celebrate by directly attacking the U.S. military in the Pacific.
“The key premise of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power to establish global leadership,” and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a necessary condition to maintain. such leadership. ”
The Trump administration came to similar conclusions, although only a few weeks before he left office did he publish a real strategy for dealing with China. Attempts to strangle Huawei, China’s national champion in telecommunications, and end control of social media programs such as TikTok were ultimately a disorganized attempt that often involved threatening and malicious allies thinking about buying Chinese technology.
Part of the purpose of the Alaska meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden government is determined to compete across the board with Beijing to offer competitive technologies, such as semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence, though it means spending billions on government-led research and development projects, and new industrial partnerships with Europe, India, Japan and Australia.