During the past three decades, there has been a momentous change in the global economy. One of the most troubling and puzzling features — the failure of poor countries to catch up to developed countries — has seemingly been overturned.
One of the digital planet’s many pleasures is that it has many distinct mountaintops. Different locations have offered different advantages: The US, Europe, China and India. But that era might be coming to an end. We may be en route to digital unipolarity as all the others cede the high ground to China.
The world is changing faster than ever before. With billions of people hyper-connected to each other in an unprecedented global network, it allows for an almost instantaneous and frictionless spread of new ideas and innovations. Combine this connectedness with rapidly changing demographics, shifting values and attitudes, growing political uncertainty, and exponential advances in technology, and it’s clear the next decade is setting up to be one of historic transformation. But where do all of these big picture trends intersect, and how can we make sense of a world engulfed in complexity and nuance? Furthermore, how do we set our sails to take advantage of the opportunities presented by this sea of change?
For China, the original idea behind MIC2025 was simply to catch up with other countries, a tall order even by its own admission. Look no further than the new-generation information technology sector, one of the plan’s 10 target industries. After more than two decades and billions of dollars spent, China has yet to commercialise a home-grown operating system for computers, or a microchip, not to mention breaking into the global computing market that Microsoft and Intel dominate.
For almost five decades, the United States has guided the growth of the Internet. From its origins as a small Pentagon program to its status as a global platform that connects more than half of the world’s population and tens of billions of devices, the Internet has long been an American project. Yet today, the United States has ceded leadership in cyberspace to China.
Foreign spies have been showing up uninvited to San Francisco and Silicon Valley for a very long time. According to former U.S. intelligence officials, that’s true today more than ever. In fact, they warn—especially because of increasing Russian and Chinese aggressiveness, and the local concentration of world-leading science and technology firms—there’s a full-on epidemic of espionage on the West Coast right now.
China’s US imports aren’t large enough to match Trump’s tariffs dollar for dollar, but there are other levers available, such as taxes and added regulation on US companies, slowing deal approvals, or boycotts of American products.
It is probably a war over trade. But it is also a battle over technology. As the US and China veer towards a full-blown trade war, US President Donald Trump singled out Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” plan as a major threat to US economic interests that violates global trade rules.
Read Here – South China Morning Post
Also read: Telcogeopolitics: West vs. China in 5G race
Security and economics experts say they are unsure how much financial or national security harm these Chinese investments are actually causing the United States — if any — simply because it may not be clear for years exactly how important the technology may be. In the meantime, entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are blunt: America actually needs Chinese money to maintain its global tech advantage.
The gradual disintegration of the Chimerica symbiosis is likely to be the world’s biggest business story for the next several years, if not decades. Even if the U.S. and China don’t come to blows, their deepening economic rivalry creates a headache for multinational companies that have spent decades constructing global supply chains.
