Your way to power is to build new networks, instead of interrupting the old ones. Economists debate when the Chinese will have the largest gross domestic product in the world – perhaps at the end of this decade – and whether they will be able to fulfill their other two major national goals: build the world’s most powerful armed forces and dominate the race for key technologies by 2049 , the 100th anniversary of Mao’s revolution.
Its power does not come from its relatively small nuclear arsenal or its growing stockpile of conventional weapons. Instead, it stems from their expanding economic power and how they use their government-subsidized technology to connect nations – whether Latin America or the Middle East, Africa or Eastern Europe – with 5G wireless networks designed to unite more and more to Beijing. It comes from the submarine cables they are wrapping around the world to make these networks work on Chinese-owned circuits.
Ultimately, it will come from how they use these networks to make other nations dependent on Chinese technology. As soon as this happens, the Chinese will be able to export part of their authoritarianism, for example, by selling facial recognition software to other nations that have enabled them to repress dissent at home.
That is why Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, who was with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken for the meeting with his Chinese colleagues in Anchorage, warned in a series of writings in recent years that it might be a mistake to assume that China plans to win by directly facing the United States military in the Pacific.
“The central premises of this alternative approach would be that economic and technological power is fundamentally more important than traditional military power in establishing global leadership,” he wrote, “and that a physical sphere of influence in East Asia is not a pre- necessary condition to sustain such leadership. “
The Trump administration reached similar conclusions, although it did not publish a real strategy to deal with China until weeks before leaving office. His attempts to strangle China, China’s national telecommunications champion, and take control of social media applications like TikTok, ended in a disorganized effort that often involved threatening and angering allies who were considering buying Chinese technology.
Part of the aim of the Alaskan meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden government is determined to compete with Beijing in all areas to offer competitive technology, such as semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence, even if it means spending billions on government-led research. and development projects and new industrial partnerships with Europe, India, Japan and Australia.