https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/chinas-technology-war-with-america/Nothing less than global dominance is at stake
‘Self-determination and innovation is the unavoidable path . . . to climb to the world’s top as a leading player in technology. We [should] hold innovative development tightly in our own hands. . . . The situation is pressing. The challenges are pressing. The mission upon us is pressing.”
With those words, spoken at the opening of the joint annual conference of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering in May, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party declared war on the United States. Not an actual war, of course, or even a cold war like the one we fought against the Soviet Union. No, this is a war for control of key sectors of the global economy, as laid out in Xi’s “Made in China 2025” initiative at the 19th Party Congress last October: a struggle for high-tech supremacy over everything from robotics and advanced telecommunications to artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the quantum computers of the future.
The stakes of this conflict are in many ways as serious as those of the race for nuclear supremacy during the Cold War. It isn’t being fought over military hardware such as Minuteman missiles or even today’s stealth fighters and nuclear submarines — although the ultimate utility of such weapons will depend on who finally wins this high-tech race. The technologies in question are ostensibly civilian: cell phones, microchips, supercomputers, and the coming Internet of Things, as well as basic research and development in areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Yet these are precisely the technologies that will power and network the world’s most advanced weapons systems — and, especially in the case of quantum technology, become weapons systems themselves.