中國，美國從未遇到過這樣的對手。

中國的挑戰，美國從未遇到過這樣的對手。

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-chinese-challenge/

作者：David P. Goldman 2020 年春季論文

精神病學家伊麗莎白·庫伯勒-羅斯描述了悲傷的五個階段：否認、憤怒、討價還價、抑鬱和接受。 過去十年來，美國一直否認中國崛起為全球大國。 我們無法相信一個世代以來都是貧困代名詞的國家能夠與我們競爭。 隨著 2016 年唐納德·特朗普 (Donald Trump) 的當選，我們已經轉變為憤怒。 就目前情況而言，我們很快就會討價還價。

幾千年來，中國的內部弱點——自然災害、饑荒、瘟疫、內亂和外國入侵——一直讓中國的注意力集中在國內。 我們現在正處於中國曆史上自公元前三世紀統一以來最偉大的轉折點。 中國正在轉向外向——但不想統治你。 就像《星際迷航》中的博格一樣，它想要同化你。

特朗普總統堅持認為美國與中國的現狀不能繼續下去，這是正確的。 他反對他們係統性盜竊美國知識產權以及將我們的製造業遷移到中國。 他扭轉了20年來對中國挑戰我們戰略主導地位的善意忽視，並采取有力措施遏製中國的擴張。 但他沒有成功。 到目前為止，他隻解決了症狀而不是原因。 到 2019 年底，我們與中國的貿易戰最終達成了不穩定的休戰協議，對兩國經濟造成了一定程度的損害，但沒有明顯的贏家。

工業革命

過去的一年是一個分水嶺。 從目前的情況來看，美國將在未來幾年內被中國超越。 中國正在重點領域發展自主知識產權。 其中一些比我們更好——在人工智能、電信、密碼學和電子戰方麵。 在量子計算等其他關鍵領域（可能是 21 世紀技術的聖杯），很難說誰會獲勝，但中國的支出遠遠超過我們。

中國第一家偉大的跨國公司華為正在整個歐亞大陸（從俄羅斯符拉迪沃斯托克到英國布裏斯托爾）推出第五代（5G）移動寬帶，盡管特朗普政府全力阻止。 2020 年 1 月，美國最親密的盟友英國拒絕了特朗普的個人幹預，允許華為建設英國 5G 網絡的一部分。 歐盟宣布不會采取任何措施排除這家中國巨頭。 華盛頓試圖通過對5G設備和智能手機的美國零部件實施出口管製來扼殺華為，結果卻看到華為繼續擴大使用亞洲零部件的規模，同時實現芯片生產的自給自足。

前眾議院議長紐特·金裏奇對此表示遺憾，稱其為“美國曆史上最大的戰略災難”。 處於危險之中的不僅是新工業時代的力量，還有大量的衍生應用程序，這些應用程序將在中國所謂的第四次工業革命中改變製造業、采礦業、醫療保健、金融、運輸和零售業——幾乎整個經濟生活。 。

誠然，中國也麵臨著自己的挑戰。 一種致命的冠狀病毒變種已導致 2000 多名中國人死亡，數萬人患病，這是對北京政權治理的嚴峻考驗。 病毒疫情暴露了中國的脆弱性，也暴露了中國政府的力量和殘酷。 中國科學家在疫情爆發後兩周內對該病毒的基因組進行了測序，並將其發布，以便世界各地的製藥實驗室能夠研究疫苗。 中國在不到十天的時間裏在武漢新建了兩座擁有千張床位的醫院。 中國政府利用其絕對權力隔離了像一些歐洲國家一樣大的城市，封鎖了交通，並控製了數億人的流動。 它分析了近十億部智能手機的位置數據，以識別可能的感染群，這似乎是迄今為止最大規模的人工智能應用。

美國官員警告稱，華為的5G係統將使中國能夠竊聽世界通信並竊取世界數據。 這是一個風險——英語國家的“五眼”組織幾十年來一直在監控世界的信號流量——但其他風險更大。 語音通話的端到端加密已經實現，中國主導的密碼學突破很快將使任何人無法竊取大量數據。 但華為認為自己沒有必要竊取全球數據。 它期望世界免費移交它。

不那麽秘密的計劃

自 2001 年張國榮的暢銷書《中國即將崩潰》出版以來，中國的人均國內生產總值增長了五倍。 曾經是第三世界貧民窟的中國城市如今已發展成為看起來像科幻電影場景的鋼鐵和玻璃龐然大物—

不僅是上海、深圳和廣州，還有成都和重慶這樣的內陸城市，每個城市都有3000萬人口。 中國的經濟增長已放緩至每年 6%——大約是美國增速的三倍。 中國的債務負擔略高於其GDP的三倍，與美國大致相同。

格雷厄姆·艾利森教授在《注定戰爭》（2017）一書中警告說，戰爭是崛起大國挑戰老牌強國時的典型結果。 正如我在 CRB 2017 年秋季刊（“我們必須戰鬥嗎？”）中指出的那樣，艾利森的論文有很多錯誤。 最明顯的是實用性的：中國在火箭、超高速滑翔導彈、潛艇和其他軍事技術上進行了大量投資，這些技術阻止人們進入中國海岸及其周邊地區。 悉尼大學 2019 年的一項研究警告稱，中國的導彈部隊可以在戰爭爆發後數小時內摧毀美國大部分西太平洋資產。 即使我們希望對中國采取軍事選擇，我們也被阻止這樣做。

哈德遜研究所中國戰略中心主任白邦瑞認為，中國有一個秘密計劃，旨在取代美國成為世界領先的超級大國，但其高科技軍事建設並不是什麽秘密。 中國已經展示了擊沉美國船隻和致盲美國衛星的能力。 中國的火箭、潛艇、電子對抗和防空係統的結合使我們的西太平洋軍事資產坐以待斃。 幾年前我們失去了南海。 不出所料，菲律賓於2020年2月單方麵退出了與美國的聯合防禦協議。 當我們在亞洲最古老的盟友走向彼岸時，我們應該問自己：為什麽？

中國的全球野心也不是什麽秘密。 它旨在將歐亞大陸納入數萬億美元的“一帶一路”倡議下的中國經濟圈，並利用其5G寬帶優勢引領第四次工業革命。 自2011年以來，華為網站一直在宣傳中國的全球經濟霸主計劃； 過去十年來，中國在每次電信會議上都大張旗鼓地宣布了這一點，並花費了大量資金。 中國的軍事野心固然重要，但其經濟和技術願景卻屈從於其宏大的經濟和技術願景，以至於美國分析人士缺乏洞察力。

美國戰略家似乎認為我們麵對的是 20 世紀 80 年代的蘇聯。 如果真那麽容易就好了！ 共產主義是一種破產的意識形態，是社會和經濟組織的悲慘失敗。 中國則完全不同。 蘇聯共產黨人告訴他們最有才華的科學家，“發明一些新東西，我們會給你一枚獎章，也許還會給你一座別墅。” 中國說，“發明新東西，發起首次公開募股，並成為億萬富翁。” 截至 2019 年底，中國有 285 名億萬富翁，其中包括阿裏巴巴的馬雲，他和許多其他億萬富翁一樣，是一名共產黨員。 馬薩諸塞州劍橋市的馬克思主義者比整個中國還要多。 幾年前，我在北京吃晚飯時遇到了一位自稱馬克思主義者的人，他是一位在共產黨幹部學校教授馬克思列寧主義學說的令人愉快的家夥。 他的女兒剛剛從美國頂尖大學畢業； 他問我是否可以幫助她在華爾街找到一份工作。

我們麵對的不是醉酒、腐敗的蘇聯官僚，而是從世界上最大國家最聰明的大學畢業生中精心挑選的普通話精英。 美國麵臨著比腐朽的馬克思主義更令人畏懼的事情：一個擁有 5000 年曆史的帝國，它務實、好奇、適應能力強、冷酷無情，而且饑渴難耐。 中國現在的政權是殘酷的，但並不比在長城裏埋葬百萬勞工的秦朝更殘酷。 中國過去是、現在仍然是極其殘酷的。

華為為新中華帝國提供了模板。 該公司擊敗了競爭對手並雇傭了他們的人才。 它在移動寬帶研發領域占據主導地位，因為其 5 萬名外國員工從事大部分基礎研究。 中國在其悠久的曆史上第一次成功地吸收了足夠數量的西方科學和工程精英，並利用他們實現其全球野心。

移動寬帶隻是一個開始。 中國的目標是掌控經濟生活各個領域的“控製點”。 想象一下工業機器人，它們通過 5G 網絡相互通信，並利用人工智能來設計生產技術，無需人工輸入； 利用不斷更新的生命體征和十億人的遺傳曆史進行醫療診斷； 采礦機器人由身穿白大褂、戴著虛擬現實護目鏡的技術人員指揮； 寬帶和人工智能的結合使其他十幾種顛覆性技術成為可能。

中國乞討、借用和竊取了使其經濟規模與美國相當的技術。 它每年支付 360 億美元的知識產權使用費——但它的賬單應該要大得多。 公然盜竊包括波音 C-17 軍用運輸機的計劃，該計劃被中國黑客竊取並用於製造山寨機 Y-20 運輸機。 其他計劃則由受雇於西方的中國工程師實施，他們學習了雇主的技術，並在走出去時掌握了複製這些技術的技能。 還有更多的計劃是由渴望進入中國市場的西方公司簡單地交給的，並樂意放棄家族珠寶以換取特權。 這對他們的長期競爭力不利，但對首席執行官五年內的股票期權有利。

中國從美國竊取的最重要的東西是一個偉大的理念，它使美國在蘇聯解體後成為世界上唯一的超級大國。 這個想法是通過積極追求先進的武器係統來推動基礎研發，並讓副產品滲透到民用經濟。 中國就像一個兩級火箭。 在鄧小平的改革之後，出口驅動型、廉價勞動力經濟將中國從一個貧窮的農村國家變成了一個繁榮的城市化巨人。 中國十年前就開始拋棄這個助推器。 下一階段是華為的第四次工業革命，由人工智能、機器人、互聯網和海量大數據應用到供應鏈管理、交通、醫療等領域。

大黃蜂的飛行

美國對中國全球野心的回應失敗了。 這次失敗有兩個重要原因。 首先，我們長期低估中國的能力和野心。 其次，我們沒有解決好我們自己的問題。 中國設想建立一個虛擬帝國，其中改變遊戲規則的技術主導生產、采購、金融和運輸。 它在基礎研究、科學教育和基礎設施方麵投入了大量資源。 相比之下，美國對基礎研究和科學教育的承諾已縮減至裏根政府時期的一半左右。

中國經濟就像一隻大黃蜂，本不該飛，但它卻飛了。 美國評論家很難解釋中國的成功，因此他們假裝它不存在，或者即使存在，也不會存在太久。 例如，特朗普在 2019 年 7 月 30 日發推文稱，“中國表現非常糟糕，是 27 年來最糟糕的一年……” 在過去的三年裏，我們的經濟規模比中國經濟大得多。”

誰的經濟更大，就看你的衡量標準了。 以美元計算，美國的規模要大得多。 但如果算上商品和服務的相對成本，根據世界銀行的購買力平價衡量標準，中國經濟比美國大約 4 萬億美元。 這說明中國國內價格遠低於美國價格。 2019年8月，從成都機場打車半小時，花費了我大約5美元。 在美國任何一個城市，花費都是 50 到 70 美元。 以現價美元計算，中國 2018 年 GDP 約為 13 萬億美元，而美國則超過 20 萬億美元，但購買力平價是一個更具信息性的衡量標準。

一個30歲的中國人的消費量幾乎是他出生時父親或母親的十倍。 那些在泥土地板和戶外廁所的家庭中長大的中國人現在住在有中央供暖和室內管道的公寓裏。 曾經省錢購買自行車的中國人現在也能買得起汽車了。 中國政府的數據是否是為了讓事情看起來更好而造假？ 不要指望它。 電力生產、貨運量和主要工業項目生產等經濟活動的基本指標是可驗證的，並且它們密切跟蹤報告的GDP增長。 中國已建成世界上最長的高速公路係統（約90,000英裏）、世界上最大的高鐵網絡（目前約18,000英裏，到2025年將增至24,000英裏），以及足夠的住房將近6億人從農村轉移到城市 。 30年前，這些都不存在。 中國的基礎設施是現代世界的奇跡。 與中國的機場、公路、鐵路相比，美國大部分地區看起來就像是第三世界國家。

目前，中國畢業生的科學家和工程師數量比美國、歐洲、日本、台灣和韓國的總和還多，是美國的六倍。 過去十年，中國科學教育的質量已達到世界水平。 20世紀60年代毛澤東的文化大革命幾乎摧毀了中國的大學體係。 得益於美國研究生院，中國大學聚集了世界一流的科學和工程師資隊伍。

美國計算機科學和電氣工程領域五分之四的博士學位授予外國學生，其中中國學生是最大的群體。 隻有 5% 的美國本科生主修工程，這意味著最近獲得博士學位的教師職位並不多。

很難衡量中國 STEM 教育與世界其他地區的相對質量。 （倫敦）《泰晤士報高等教育增刊》將五所中國大學列入世界前 50 名工程技術學校排名。 中國科技公司的高管告訴我，他們不願意雇用擁有美國大學學士學位的中國畢業生。 他們認為，中國的課程更加嚴格，出國留學的中國學生可能是富裕家庭的孩子，但在中國高考中成績不佳。

中國不再需要竊取或複製西方技術。 過去五年，中國生產了世界上最好的5G設備、一些世界上最快的超級計算機、超高速戰略導彈、可與美國最好的設計相媲美的計算機芯片，以及無法破解的網絡安全技術——量子密碼學。 2019 年，中國機器人航天器首次在月球背麵軟著陸。這僅僅是開始。

研究和債務

中國目前的研發支出約占 GDP 的 2.2%，而美國為 2.8%，但考慮到我們經濟的相對規模，他們的研發支出絕對值與我們大致相同。 一個很大的區別在於支出的構成。 大多數美國研發部門尋求對現有產品進行漸進式改進——升級的洗衣粉或鹹味較少的罐裝湯。 正如五角大樓在 2019 年中國軍事能力評估中所解釋的那樣，中國的研發集中於軍民兩用技術。 在關鍵領域，中國的支出比我們多得多。 哈德遜研究所分析師阿瑟·赫爾曼 (Arthur Herman) 2019 年在《華爾街日報》上寫道：

北京是美國在量子計算領域的主要競爭對手。 它每年至少花費 25 億美元用於研究，是華盛頓支出的 10 倍以上，並且在合肥省擁有一個大型量子中心。 中國渴望開發密碼破譯的“殺手級應用程序”，這意味著保護美國數據和網絡免受量子入侵是至關重要的安全利益。

華為是移動寬帶領域的全球行業領導者，其研發支出超過其主要競爭對手諾基亞和愛立信的總和。

巴布森學院教授托馬斯·達文波特表示，中國政府對人工智能的支持讓美國的努力“相形見絀”：

2017 年，[中國] 中央政府宣布希望到 2030 年使中國及其產業成為人工智能技術的世界領先者。政府最新的風險投資基金預計將在國有企業的人工智能和相關技術上投資超過 300 億美元 ，並且該基金加入了規模更大的國家資助的風險投資基金。 僅中國一個國家就表示將投入 50 億美元用於開發人工智能技術和業務。 北京市已投入 20 億美元開發人工智能產業園。 主要港口天津計劃投資 160 億美元發展當地人工智能產業……

美國的投資計劃（主要是國防工業）與中國的努力相比相形見絀。 美國國防部的研究部門 DARPA 多年來一直讚助人工智能研究和競賽，並擁有一個名為“AI Next”的 20 億美元基金，幫助大學和公司開發下一波人工智能技術。 目前尚不清楚其努力取得了多少實際進展。

一些分析人士稱，中國經濟將遭受債務危機。 但數字並不支持這一觀點。 根據國際清算銀行的數據，中國和美國的債務負擔大致相同。 中國政府、家庭和非金融企業的信貸總額占 GDP 的 261%，美國占 GDP 的 249%。 最大的區別在於誰欠債務。 中國中央政府債務約占GDP的一半，但在美國約占GDP的100%。 相比之下，美國私人企業債務僅占 GDP 的 75% 左右，而中國則占 GDP 的 150% 左右。

誠然，中國的金融體係存在很多問題。 它過度依賴大型國有銀行，這些銀行習慣於不加詢問地向國有企業發放貸款。 這助長了低效率和腐敗。 中國當局允許私營企業倒閉，而不是鼓勵銀行掩蓋其問題。 2019 年前 11 個月，有 170 億美元的中國企業債券違約，與 4.4 萬億美元的境內企業債券市場整體相比，這個數字很小。

不過，大多數中國企業債務都是為基礎設施提供資金，而這些基礎設施在很大程度上可以支撐債務負擔。 中國為基礎設施支出提供資金的方式解釋了債務集中度差異的大部分原因。 在美國，聯邦、州和地方政府通過稅收或借款為基礎設施支出提供資金； 在中國，國有企業從國有銀行借款為基礎設施提供資金。

在《亞洲時報》2017 年的一項研究中，我計算出，中國基準股指深圳 300 指數中非金融公司所欠淨債務的三分之二僅由 22 家公司所欠。 幾乎所有這些都涉及基礎設施（能源、通信基礎設施、航運、航空或金屬）。 這種中國企業債務應被視為中國主權的“公共工程”投資。

在借入與各自經濟規模大致相同的金額後，中國和美國得到了什麽回報？ 美國的國債已超過 20 萬億美元，這還不包括估計還有 46 萬億美元的無資金支持的社會保障和醫療保險負債。 我們把大部分錢都花在了轉移支付上。 中國利用債務將5.5億人從農村轉移到城市，並建設了世界上最新、最大的基礎設施。

沒有快速修複

我們用“帝國”這個詞來形容中國，喚起人們對軍事征服和殖民占領的記憶。 但中國是一個完全不同的實體：它的目標是同化和間接控製，而不是帝國統治。 它避免了帝國主義對外國軍事承諾的過度擴張，並尋求通過貿易和技術的主導地位來鎖定其影響力。

美國應對中國沒有簡單的辦法，沒有快速解決辦法，沒有捷徑。 世界從未見過像中國這樣的全球突破。 它將改變這個星球上每個居民的生活，包括美國人。 俄羅斯革命家托洛茨基（Leon Trotsky）說過（杜撰的），你可能對戰爭不感興趣，但戰爭對你感興趣。 中國也是如此。

第二次世界大戰後，美國人僅僅因為是美國人而獲得報酬。 整個世界都必須來到我們身邊。 我們擁有唯一的深度資本市場、唯一的風險投資家、唯一能夠投入大量資源支持基礎研發的國防機構，以及唯一準備將創新轉化為產品的熟練勞動力。 我們發明了數字時代的每一個組成部分：半導體、顯示器、傳感器、激光器、網絡和互聯網本身。 美國公司在數十個領域享有自然壟斷。 我們的商品和服務以溢價出售。 美元為王。 當我在裏根第一屆政府期間住在德國時，德國基地的美國士兵用陸軍工資購買了寶馬。

1960年，美國的GDP占世界的40%。 現在它的產量為24%。 更重要的是美國在高科技工業生產中所占份額的下降：根據世界銀行的數據，美國的份額從1999年的18%下降到2014年的7%，而中國則從3%上升到26%。 美國對高科技製造業的承諾隨著 2000 年的科技泡沫而崩潰，再也沒有恢複過。 在接下來的 20 年裏，美國家庭的收入幾乎沒有增長，這並非巧合。

中國麵臨的挑戰是艱巨的。 我們正在與14億聰明勤勞的人民競爭。 中國學童早上 7:30 到校，下午 5:00 離開。 每年有 1000 萬中國青少年參加高考，兩年內每天準備 12 個小時，以獲得一所好大學的錄取。 亞洲人的職業道德解釋了為什麽美國常春藤盟校的學生中有 28% 是亞洲人，盡管亞洲人僅占美國人口的 5.6%。 我們為中國大學培養了世界一流的工程師資隊伍，其中最好的師資水平與美國最好的大學不相上下。

但我們已經遠遠超出了通過中美技術能力的一對一比較就能解釋戰略平衡的地步。 中國已招募了數十萬名西方最優秀的科學家和技術人員。 華為創造了中國曆史上獨一無二的商業模式，擁有5萬名外籍員工，並在二十幾個西方國家設有研究中心。 它不是一家中國公司，而是一家帝國公司，是一種由技術驅動的群體，會產生滾雪球效應。 隨著它的成長，它會壓垮競爭對手並吸收他們的人才。

1258 年，巴格達落入蒙古人之手，這就是一個真實的教訓。 這座擁有 100 萬人口的城市躲在 18 英尺高的城牆後麵，阿拔斯王朝哈裏發穆斯塔西姆拒絕了蒙古人的進貢要求。 阿拔斯王朝認為，蒙古人是輕裝騎兵。 麵對巴格達 18 英尺厚的城牆，他們能做什麽？ 但蒙古酋長旭烈兀汗帶來了1000名中國炮兵專家，他們隻用了三個星期就攻破了城牆，之後蒙古人用巴格達居民的頭像建造了一座巨大的金字塔。

當然，今天的中國人不是蒙古人，但這個類比是成立的：中國人從西方獲得了毀滅我們的技術手段。 中國的批評者抱怨它竊取了西方技術。 更危險的是，中國已經學會了吸收西方最優秀的人才。

美國能否繼續成為世界上最強大、生產力和創新力最強的國家？ 我們以前曾麵臨過這樣的挑戰——在第二次世界大戰期間，當時民主軍械庫壓倒了軸心國； 在太空競賽期間，我們克服了俄羅斯早期的領先優勢，將人類送上了月球； 在裏根政府時期，數字革命超越了俄羅斯在軍事技術方麵虛幻的優勢。 我們需要像約翰·F·肯尼迪的登月計劃和裏根的戰略防禦計劃那樣做出全國性的努力，以恢複美國在高科技製造和軍事應用方麵的決定性優勢。 如果我們不這樣做——如果中國超越美國——我們就會陷入二流地位，就像20世紀的英國一樣。 我們將變得更窮、更弱、更不安全。 選擇權是我們的，至少在一段時間內是這樣。

大衛·P·戈德曼 (David P. Goldman) 是《亞洲時報》的副主編、克萊蒙特研究所美國生活方式中心的華盛頓研究員，以及最近出版的《你將...》一書的作者... 閱讀更多

The Chinese Challenge, America has never faced such an adversary.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-chinese-challenge/

by David P. Goldman spring 2020 essays

 

 

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Over the past decade America has been in denial about China’s emergence as a global power. We couldn’t believe a country that for generations was a byword for poverty could compete with us. With Donald Trump’s election in 2016 we’ve transitioned to anger. As matters stand, we’ll be bargaining before long.

For thousands of years China’s internal weaknesses—natural disaster, famine, plague, civil unrest, and foreign invasion—kept its attention inward. We are now at the greatest turning point in Chinese history since its unification in the 3rd century B.C. China is turning outward—but doesn’t want to rule you. Like the Borg in Star Trek, it wants to assimilate you.

President Trump is right to insist that America’s status quo with China can’t continue. He campaigned against their systemic theft of U.S. intellectual property and the migration of our manufacturing to China. He reversed 20 years of benign neglect toward China’s challenge to our strategic dominance and took vigorous steps to check China’s expansion. But he hasn’t succeeded. Thus far he has addressed symptoms rather than causes. Our trade war with China settled into an uneasy truce by the end of 2019, with modest damage to both economies but no clear winner.

Industrial Revolution

The past year was a watershed. As matters stand the United States will be overtaken by China in the next several years. China is developing its own intellectual property in key areas. Some of it is better than ours—in artificial intelligence, telecommunications, cryptography, and electronic warfare. In other key fields like quantum computing—possibly the holy grail of 21st-century technology—it’s hard to tell who’s winning, but China is outspending us by a huge margin.

China’s first great multinational company, Huawei, is rolling out fifth generation (5G) mobile broadband across the whole of Eurasia, from Vladivostok, Russia to Bristol, England, despite a full-court press by the Trump Administration to stop it. In January 2020 Great Britain—America’s closest ally—brushed off Trump’s personal intervention and allowed Huawei to build part of Britain’s 5G network. The European Community announced it would take no measures to exclude the Chinese giant. Washington tried to strangle Huawei by slapping export controls on U.S. components for 5G equipment and smartphones, only to see Huawei continue expanding using Asian components while achieving self-sufficiency in chip production.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deplored this as “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.” At stake are not only the sinews of the new industrial age, but scores of spinoff applications that will transform manufacturing, mining, health care, finance, transportation, and retailing—virtually the entirety of economic life—in what China calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

China has its own challenges, to be sure. A deadly variant of coronavirus has killed more than 2,000 Chinese and sickened tens of thousands of others, in a severe test of governance for the Beijing regime. The viral epidemic reveals China’s vulnerability—but also the power and ruthlessness of the Chinese state. Chinese scientists sequenced the virus’s genome within two weeks of the outbreak and posted it to enable the world’s pharmaceutical labs to work on a vaccine. China constructed two new thousand-bed hospitals in Wuhan in barely more than ten days. The Chinese state used its absolute power to quarantine cities as large as some European countries, interdict transportation, and control the movement of hundreds of millions of people. It analyzed locational data from nearly a billion smartphones to identify likely clusters of infection, in what appears to be the largest-scale application of artificial intelligence to date.

U.S. officials warn that Huawei’s 5G systems will allow China to eavesdrop on the world’s communications and steal the world’s data. That’s a risk—the “Five Eyes” group of English-speaking countries has monitored the world’s signal traffic for decades—but other risks are bigger. End-to-end encryption of voice calls is already here, and Chinese-led breakthroughs in cryptography soon will make it impossible for anyone to steal large amounts of data. But Huawei doesn’t think it needs to steal the world’s data. It expects the world to hand it over for free.

Not-So-Secret Plan

Since publication of Gordon G. Chang’s popular The Coming Collapse of China in 2001, China’s per capita Gross Domestic Product has risen five-fold. Chinese cities that were Third World slums have blossomed into steel-and-glass behemoths that look like sci-fi movie sets—not just Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, but cities deep in the interior like Chengdu and Chongqing, each with 30 million inhabitants. China’s growth has slowed to 6% a year—about three times America’s rate. China’s debt burden is slightly over three times its GDP, about the same as America’s.

Professor Graham Allison warned in Destined for War (2017) that war is the typical outcome when a rising power challenges an established one. There are many things wrong with Allison’s thesis, as I argued in the CRB’s Fall 2017 issue (“Must We Fight?”). The most obvious is practical: China has invested massively in rocketry, hypervelocity glide missiles, submarines, and other military technologies that deny access to China’s coast and its environs. A 2019 University of Sydney study warned that China’s missile force could neutralize most American Western Pacific assets within hours after war’s outbreak. Even if we wished to pursue a military option against China, we have been blocked from doing so.

Hudson Institute Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy Michael Pillsbury believes China has a secret plan to displace the United States as the world’s leading superpower, but there’s nothing secret about its high-tech military buildup. China has demonstrated its ability to sink American ships and blind U.S. satellites. The combination of Chinese rocketry, submarines, electronic countermeasures, and air defense makes our Western Pacific military assets sitting ducks. We lost the South China Sea years ago. Unsurprisingly, the Philippines in February 2020 unilaterally withdrew from its joint defense agreement with the United States. When our oldest ally in Asia goes to the other side, we should ask ourselves: why?

Nor is there anything secret about China’s global ambitions. It aims to integrate Eurasia into a Chinese economic sphere under the multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, and to use its 5G broadband dominance to lead a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Huawei’s website has advertised China’s plan for global economic supremacy since 2011; China has proclaimed it with great fanfare—and considerable expense—at every telecommunications conference for the past ten years. China’s military ambition is important, but subordinate to an economic and technological vision so vast that American analysts have lacked the intellectual bandwidth to perceive it.

American strategists seem to think we’re dealing with the Soviet Union of the 1980s. If only it were that easy! Communism is a bankrupt ideology, a miserable failure at social and economic organization. China is something entirely different. Soviet Communists told their most talented scientists, “Invent something new, and we’ll give you a medal, and maybe a dacha.” China says, “Invent something new, launch an Initial Public Offering, and become a billionaire.” By the end of 2019 there were 285 billionaires in China—including Alibaba’s Jack Ma, who, like many of his fellow billionaires, is a Communist Party member. There are more Marxists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, than in all of China. I met a professed Marxist over dinner in Beijing a couple of years ago—a pleasant fellow who taught Marxist-Leninist doctrine at the Communist Party’s cadre school. His daughter had just graduated from a top American university; he asked if I could help her get a job on Wall Street.

We aren’t facing drunken, corrupt Soviet bureaucrats, but a Mandarin elite cherry-picked from the brightest university graduates of the world’s largest country. America confronts something far more daunting than moth-eaten Marxism: a 5,000-year-old empire that is pragmatic, curious, adaptive, ruthless—and hungry. China’s current regime is cruel, but no crueler than the Qin dynasty that buried a million conscript laborers in the Great Wall. China was, and remains, utterly ruthless.

Huawei provides the template for the new Chinese empire. The company bankrupted its competition and hired their talent. It dominates R&D in mobile broadband because its 50,000 foreign employees do most of the basic research. For the first time in its long history, China has succeeded in assimilating a critical mass of the West’s scientific and engineering elite and harnessing them to its global ambitions.

Mobile broadband is just the beginning. China’s goal is to own the “control points” in every sphere of economic life. Think of industrial robots that talk to each other over 5G networks and employ artificial intelligence to design production techniques without human input; medical diagnostics drawing on continuously-updated vital signs and genetic histories of a billion people; mining robots directed by white-coated technicians with virtual reality visors; and a dozen other disruptive technologies made possible by the marriage of broadband and A.I.

China has begged, borrowed, and stolen the technology that made its economy as big as America’s. It pays $36 billion a year in royalties for intellectual property—but its bill should be much bigger. Outright thefts include the plans for Boeing’s C-17 military transport aircraft, phished by Chinese hackers and used to build a knockoff, the Y-20 transport. Other plans are lifted by Western-employed Chinese engineers who learn their employers’ technology and walk out the door with the skills to duplicate it. Still more plans are simply handed over by Western companies eager to access the Chinese market and happy to give away the family jewels for the privilege. That’s bad for their long-term competitiveness—but good for the CEO’s stock options at a five-year horizon.

The most important thing China appropriated from the United States is the one big idea that made America the world’s only superpower after the Soviet Union’s collapse. That idea is to drive fundamental R&D through the aggressive pursuit of superior weapons systems, and let the spinoffs trickle down to the civilian economy. China is like a two-stage rocket. The export-driven, cheap labor economy that turned it from an impoverished rural country into a prosperous urbanized giant after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms was the booster. China began to discard that booster ten years ago. The next stage is Huawei’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven by artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet, and massive big data applications to supply-chain management, transportation, health care, and other fields.

Flight of the Bumblebee

America’s response to China’s global ambitions has failed. There are two big reasons for this failure. First, we chronically underestimate China’s capabilities and ambitions. Second, we have failed to address our own problems. China envisions a virtual empire in which game-changing technology dominates production, purchasing, finance, and transportation. It puts massive resources into basic research, science education, and infrastructure. America’s commitment to basic research and science education, in contrast, has shrunk to roughly half its size during the Reagan Administration.

China’s economy is like the bumblebee that shouldn’t be able to fly—but does. American commentators have trouble explaining China’s success so they pretend it isn’t there, or, if there, won’t be for long. Trump, for example, tweeted on July 30, 2019, that “China is doing very badly, worst year in 27…. Our Economy has become MUCH larger than the Chinese Economy in the last 3 years.”

Whose economy is bigger depends on your measure. In U.S. dollar terms, America’s is much larger. But if you include the relative cost of goods and services, China’s economy is about $4 trillion bigger than America’s, according to the World Bank’s measure of purchasing power parity. That accounts for the fact that domestic Chinese prices are much lower than U.S. prices. A half-hour taxi ride from Chengdu Airport in August 2019 cost me about five U.S. dollars. In any American city it would’ve cost $50 to $70 dollars. In current U.S. dollars, China’s 2018 GDP was about $13 trillion versus over $20 trillion for the U.S. But purchasing power parity is a more informative measure.

A 30-year-old Chinese consumes almost ten times as much as his father or mother did at his birth. Chinese who grew up in homes with dirt floors and outhouses now live in apartments with central heating and indoor plumbing. Chinese who scrimped to buy bicycles now can afford cars. Are Chinese government data faked to make things look better? Don’t count on it. Basic indicators of economic activity such as electricity production, freight traffic, and production of key industrial items are verifiable, and they track reported GDP growth closely. China has built the world’s longest highway system (about 90,000 miles), the world’s largest high-speed rail network (about 18,000 miles today, growing to 24,000 miles by 2025), and enough housing to move nearly 600 million people from the countryside to cities. None of this was there 30 years ago. China’s infrastructure is the wonder of the modern world. Compared to China’s airports, roads, and rail lines, most of the United States looks like a Third World country.

China now graduates more scientists and engineers than the United States, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea combined, and six times as many as the United States alone. During the past ten years the quality of Chinese scientific education has risen to world standards. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s nearly destroyed China’s university system. Thanks to American graduate schools, Chinese universities have assembled a world-class scientific and engineering faculty. Four out of five doctoral degrees in computer science and electrical engineering in America are awarded to foreign students, of whom Chinese are the largest contingent. Only 5% of American undergraduates major in engineering, which means there aren’t a lot of available faculty positions for recent doctorates.

It’s hard to measure the relative quality of STEM education in China versus the rest of the world. The (London) Times Higher Education Supplement includes five Chinese universities in its ranking of the world’s top 50 engineering and technology schools. Executives of Chinese tech companies have told me they prefer not to hire Chinese graduates with a bachelor’s degree from an American university. Chinese programs are more rigorous, they argue, and Chinese students who go overseas probably are the children of well-to-do families who didn’t score well on China’s university entrance exam.

China no longer needs to steal or copy Western technology. Over the past five years China has produced the world’s best 5G equipment, some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, hypervelocity strategic missiles, computer chips that rival the best America can design, and an unhackable cybersecurity technology, quantum cryptography. A Chinese robotic spacecraft made the first soft landing on the dark side of the moon in 2019. That’s just the beginning.

Research and Debt

China now spends about 2.2% of GDP on research and development, compared to 2.8% in the United States—but, given the relative sizes of our economies, their R&D spending in absolute terms is about the same as ours. A big difference is in the composition of spending. Most American R&D seeks incremental improvements in existing products—an upgraded laundry detergent or a less salty can of soup. China’s R&D, as the Pentagon explained in its 2019 assessment of China’s military capabilities, concentrates on dual-use—civilian and military—technologies. In critical areas, China spends much more than we do. Hudson Institute analyst Arthur Herman wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2019:

Beijing is America’s chief quantum-computing rival. It spends at least $2.5 billion a year on research—more than 10 times what Washington spends—and has a massive quantum center in Hefei province. China aspires to develop the code-breaking “killer app,” which means protecting U.S. data and networks from quantum intrusion is a vital security interest.

Huawei, the world industry leader in mobile broadband, spends more on R&D than its main rivals, Nokia and Ericsson, combined.

Chinese government support for artificial intelligence “dwarfs” the American effort, according to Babson College professor Thomas Davenport:

In 2017, [China’s] national government announced it wanted to make the country and its industries world leaders in AI technologies by 2030. The government’s latest venture capital fund is expected to invest more than $30 billion in AI and related technologies within state-owned firms, and that fund joins even larger state-funded venture capital funds. One Chinese state alone has said it will devote $5 billion to developing AI technologies and businesses. The city of Beijing has committed $2 billion to developing an AI-focused industrial park. A major port, Tianjin, plans to invest $16 billion in its local AI industry….

U.S. investment plans, mostly in the defense industry, are dwarfed by the Chinese effort. DARPA, the Defense Department’s research arm, has sponsored AI research and competitions for many years, and has a $2 billion fund called “AI Next” to help develop the next wave of AI technologies in universities and companies. It’s not yet clear how much real progress its efforts have made.

Some analysts claim China’s economy will suffer a debilitating debt crisis. But the numbers don’t support this view. According to the Bank for International Settlements, China and America have about the same debt burden. Total credit to government, households, and nonfinancial corporations stands at 261% of GDP in China and 249% of GDP in the United States. The big difference lies in who owes the debt. Central government debt is about half of GDP in China, but about 100% of GDP in the United States. By contrast, private corporate debt is only about 75% of GDP in the U.S. compared to about 150% of GDP in China.

China’s financial system has many problems, to be sure. It is overly dependent on giant state banks that are accustomed to handing out loans to state-owned companies without asking questions. This encourages inefficiency and corruption. The Chinese authorities allow private companies to fail rather than encourage banks to paper over their problems. Seventeen billion dollars of Chinese corporate bonds defaulted during the first 11 months of 2019, a small number compared to the overall $4.4 trillion onshore corporate bond market.

Most Chinese corporate debt, though, funded infrastructure which, for the most part, can support the debt burden. China’s way of funding infrastructure spending explains most of the difference in debt concentration. In the United States, federal, state, and local governments fund infrastructure spending out of tax revenues or borrowing; in China, state-owned companies borrow from state-owned banks to fund infrastructure.

In a 2017 study for Asia Times I calculated that two-thirds of the net debt owed by non-financial companies in China’s benchmark equity index, the Shenzhen 300, was owed by only 22 companies. Almost all are involved in basic infrastructure (energy, communications infrastructure, shipping, airlines, or metals). This Chinese corporate indebtedness should be viewed as “public works” investment by the Chinese sovereign.

After borrowing roughly the same amount relative to the size of their respective economies, what did China and the United States get in return? America’s national debt rose above $20 trillion, not counting an estimated $46 trillion more in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities. We spent most of this money on transfer payments. China used its debt to move 550 million people from countryside to city and to build the world’s newest and biggest infrastructure.

No Quick Fix

We use the word “empire” to describe China, evoking memories of military conquest and colonial occupation. But China is an entirely different entity: it aims for assimilation and indirect control rather than imperial rule. It avoids the imperial overreach of foreign military commitments and seeks to lock in its influence through dominance in trade and technology.

There is no easy way for America to respond to China, no quick fix, no shortcut. The world has seen nothing like China’s global breakout. It will transform the lives of every inhabitant of this planet, including Americans. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky said (apocryphally) that you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. The same is true of China.

After World War II, Americans got paid simply for being Americans. The whole world had to come to us. We had the only deep capital markets, the only venture capitalists, the only national defense establishment able to put massive resources behind basic R&D, and the only skilled workforce ready to turn innovations into products. We invented every component of the digital age: semiconductors, displays, sensors, lasers, networks, and the internet itself. American companies enjoyed natural monopolies in dozens of fields. Our goods and services sold at a premium. The U.S. dollar was king. When I lived in Germany during the first Reagan Administration, American soldiers on German bases bought BMWs on Army pay.

In 1960 America produced 40% of the world’s GDP. Now it produces 24%. Even more important is the decline of America’s share of high-tech industrial production: according to the World Bank, it fell from 18% in 1999 to just 7% in 2014, while China’s rose from 3% to 26%. America’s commitment to high-tech manufacturing collapsed with the tech bubble of 2000, never to recover. By no coincidence, the income of U.S. households barely grew during the next 20 years.

China’s challenge is formidable. We are competing with 1.4 billion intelligent and industrious people. Chinese schoolchildren turn up at 7:30 a.m. and leave at 5:00 p.m. Ten million Chinese teenagers take the college entrance exams each year and prep 12 hours a day for two years to gain acceptance at a good university. The Asian work ethic explains why 28% of students at America’s Ivy League colleges are Asians, although Asians comprise just 5.6% of the U.S. population. We have educated a world-class engineering faculty for Chinese universities, the best of which are at par with the best American universities.

But we are well past the point where a one-to-one comparison of Chinese and American technical capacity can explain the strategic balance. China has recruited scores of thousands of the best Western scientists and technicians. Huawei has created a business model unique in Chinese history, with 50,000 foreign employees and research centers in two dozen Western countries. It is not a Chinese but an imperial company, a sort of technologically-driven horde that produces a snowball effect. As it grows, it crushes the competition and absorbs their talent.

Baghdad’s fall to the Mongols in 1258 offers an object lesson. The city of a million people sheltered behind 18-foot walls, and the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mustasim rejected Mongol demands for tribute. The Mongols were lightly armed horsemen, the Abbasids reasoned; what could they do against the 18-foot-thick walls of Baghdad? But Mongol chieftain Hulagu Khan brought with him 1,000 Chinese artillery experts, and it took them just three weeks to breach the walls, after which the Mongols made a giant pyramid of the heads of Baghdad’s inhabitants. Today’s Chinese are not the Mongols, to be sure, but the analogy holds: the Chinese have acquired the technical means from the West to ruin us. China’s critics complain it has stolen Western technology. Far more dangerous is the fact that China has learned to assimilate the West’s best talent.

Can America remain the world’s most powerful, productive, and innovative country? We have faced this challenge before—during World War II, when the Arsenal of Democracy overwhelmed the Axis; during the Space Race, when we overcame an early Russian lead to land men on the moon; and during the Reagan Administration, when the digital revolution leapfrogged Russia’s illusory advantages in military technology. We require a national effort on the scale of John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative to restore America’s decisive edge in high-tech manufacturing and military applications. If we don’t—if China surpasses the United States—we will fade into second-rate status, much like Britain in the 20th century. We will be poorer, weaker, and less secure. The choice is ours, at least for a while.

David P. Goldman is deputy editor of Asia Times, a Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, and author, most recently, of You Will... read more

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