With little fanfare, the National People’s Congress—the annual convening of China’s top legislature and the country’s premier political event—rubber-stamped a $1.4 trillion infrastructure six-year spending plan on May 28, with fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks as its backbone.
China’s technological ambitions are eliciting rare bipartisan agreement in Washington, with lawmakers considering investing tens of billions of dollars in America’s semiconductor industry over the next five to 10 years to help the United States retain an edge over Beijing.
The Trump Administration has given conflicting signals about its intent towards Huawei, as in the flip-flop at the Pentagon over the proposed restrictions on sales of components with US content. The White House believed that it could cajole the British government into excluding Huawei, and failed to grasp what had happened even after London made its decision. This implies an intelligence failure of catastrophic proportions on the part of the United States.
Welcome to the age of great-power competition. Much more than a geopolitical bumper sticker, this label describes the foundation of what has become the free world’s new grand strategy, not just for the United States, but for many of our friends, partners and allies as well. It is a competition without precedent. One aspect of this new world disorder—advanced technological competition—is particularly noteworthy. It will be infused throughout the struggle, and if Washington wants to win, America will have to do better.
Silicon Valley’s role as a tech capital continues to grow in scale and importance, according to a new report. The region, and a few other coastal tech hubs, are gobbling up a greater share of high-tech jobs than ever. The data suggests just a few places are pulling away from the rest, taking the highest-paying jobs and investment with them.
Rising US–China tensions go beyond trade and involve a broad range of issues including strategy, security and values. It’s pertinent to also look at the choices that ASEAN and others are facing in the context of this great power contest, including decisions on economic development and technology.
A nation that has the aspiration to become a leading power someday cannot continue with unsettled borders, an unintegrated region and under-exploited opportunities. Above all, it cannot be dogmatic in approaching a visibly changing global order. Napoleon once said that history is a version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. The world that awaits us not only calls for fresh thinking, but eventually, a new consensus at home as well. Putting dogmas behind us is a starting point for that journey, says India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar.
EU officials want to set up a €100 billion wealth fund to bolster “European champions” against American and Chinese business rivals like Google, Apple and Alibaba. The proposal for a so-called European Future Fund appears in an unusually radical raft of plans that European Commission officials want to put onto the agenda of their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, whose mandate begins on November 1.
For years, Europeans were lulled into thinking that the peace and prosperity of the immediate post-Cold War period would be self-sustaining. But, two decades into the twenty-first century, it is clear that the Old Continent miscalculated and now must catch up to the digital revolution.
As China transformed, many Western scholars and policymakers predicted that economic reform and integration into the world economy would force the country to liberalize politically and become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. The idea, sometimes called “convergence theory,” was that as China grew wealthier, it would become more like the United States. The theory was comforting, but it did not pan out.
