https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-china-learned-from-cold-war-america-11595618253?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
China thinks that power is the arbiter of world affairs, and that technology is power. That’s something it learned from Ronald Reagan. He won the Cold War with a military buildup that catalyzed an economic revolution. Military research and development produced countless inventions of the Digital Age, from fast and cheap microchips to the internet. The Soviet Union folded in the face of America’s superior arms and entrepreneurial growth. China watched and learned.
It’s fashionable to talk of a “new Cold War” and China as another Soviet Union. It’s nothing of the sort. We face a strategic rival that wants to play America’s winning hand in the Cold War, through massive support for dual-use technologies, guided by a Communist legislature that includes more than 100 billionaires. And this strategy is hardly a secret; Huawei’s plan to seize the control points of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is promulgated in streaming video on the company’s website.
China already leads in 5G broadband, building three times as many network towers as America on a per capita basis. Americans tend to think of broadband as a consumer technology and 5G as a faster way to download videos. China views 5G as the enabler of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, just as railroads launched the First Industrial Revolution. (The second and third were powered by electricity and computing, respectively.) Made possible by 5G are game-changing technologies like self-programming industrial robots, remote robotic surgery, autonomous vehicles, and smartphones that do medical diagnostics and upload data to the cloud in real time—not to mention deadly drone swarms and other military applications.