中国的挑战，美国从未遇到过这样的对手
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-chinese-challenge/
作者：大卫·P·戈德曼
精神病学家伊丽莎白·库伯勒-罗斯描述了悲伤的五个阶段：否认、愤怒、讨价还价、抑郁和接受。 过去十年来，美国一直否认中国崛起为全球大国。 我们无法相信一个世代以来都是贫困代名词的国家能够与我们竞争。 随着 2016 年唐纳德·特朗普 (Donald Trump) 的当选，我们已经转变为愤怒。 就目前情况而言，我们很快就会讨价还价。
几千年来，中国的内部弱点——自然灾害、饥荒、瘟疫、内乱和外国入侵——一直让中国的注意力集中在国内。 我们现在正处于中国历史上自公元前三世纪统一以来最伟大的转折点。 中国正在转向外向——但不想统治你。 就像《星际迷航》中的博格一样，它想要同化你。
特朗普总统坚持认为美国与中国的现状不能继续下去，这是正确的。 他反对他们系统性盗窃美国知识产权以及将我们的制造业迁移到中国。 他扭转了20年来对中国挑战我们战略主导地位的善意忽视，并采取有力措施遏制中国的扩张。 但他没有成功。 到目前为止，他只解决了症状而不是原因。 到 2019 年底，我们与中国的贸易战最终达成了不稳定的休战协议，对两国经济造成了一定程度的损害，但没有明显的赢家。
工业革命
过去的一年是一个分水岭。 从目前的情况来看，美国将在未来几年内被中国超越。 中国正在重点领域发展自主知识产权。 其中一些比我们更好——在人工智能、电信、密码学和电子战方面。 在量子计算等其他关键领域（可能是 21 世纪技术的圣杯），很难说谁会获胜，但中国的支出远远超过我们。
中国第一家伟大的跨国公司华为正在整个欧亚大陆（从俄罗斯符拉迪沃斯托克到英国布里斯托尔）推出第五代（5G）移动宽带，尽管特朗普政府全力阻止。 2020 年 1 月，美国最亲密的盟友英国拒绝了特朗普的个人干预，允许华为建设英国 5G 网络的一部分。 欧盟宣布不会采取任何措施排除这家中国巨头。 华盛顿试图通过对5G设备和智能手机的美国零部件实施出口管制来扼杀华为，结果却看到华为继续扩大使用亚洲零部件的规模，同时实现芯片生产的自给自足。
前众议院议长纽特·金里奇对此表示遗憾，称其为“美国历史上最大的战略灾难”。 处于危险之中的不仅是新工业时代的力量，还有大量的衍生应用程序，这些应用程序将在中国所谓的第四次工业革命中改变制造业、采矿业、医疗保健、金融、运输和零售业——几乎整个经济生活。 。
诚然，中国也面临着自己的挑战。 一种致命的冠状病毒变种已导致 2000 多名中国人死亡，数万人患病，这是对北京政权治理的严峻考验。 病毒疫情暴露了中国的脆弱性，也暴露了中国政府的力量和残酷。 中国科学家在疫情爆发后两周内对该病毒的基因组进行了测序，并将其发布，以便世界各地的制药实验室能够研究疫苗。 中国在不到十天的时间里在武汉新建了两座拥有千张床位的医院。 中国政府利用其绝对权力隔离了像一些欧洲国家一样大的城市，封锁了交通，并控制了数亿人的流动。 它分析了近十亿部智能手机的位置数据，以识别可能的感染群，这似乎是迄今为止最大规模的人工智能应用。
美国官员警告称，华为的5G系统将使中国能够窃听世界通信并窃取世界数据。 这是一个风险——英语国家的“五眼”组织几十年来一直在监控世界的信号流量——但其他风险更大。 语音通话的端到端加密已经实现，中国主导的密码学突破很快将使任何人无法窃取大量数据。 但华为认为自己没有必要窃取全球数据。 它期望世界免费移交它。
不那么秘密的计划
自 2001 年张国荣的畅销书《中国即将崩溃》出版以来，中国的人均国内生产总值增长了五倍。 中国曾经是第三世界贫民窟的城市已经发展成为看起来像科幻电影场景的钢铁和玻璃庞然大物
——不仅是上海、深圳和广州，还有像成都和重庆这样的内陆城市，每个城市都有3000万人口。 中国的经济增长已放缓至每年 6%——大约是美国增速的三倍。 中国的债务负担略高于其GDP的三倍，与美国大致相同。
格雷厄姆·艾利森教授在《注定战争》（2017）一书中警告说，战争是崛起大国挑战老牌强国时的典型结果。 正如我在 CRB 2017 年秋季刊（“我们必须战斗吗？”）中指出的那样，艾利森的论文有很多错误。 最明显的是实用性的：中国在火箭、超高速滑翔导弹、潜艇和其他军事技术上进行了大量投资，这些技术阻止人们进入中国海岸及其周边地区。 悉尼大学 2019 年的一项研究警告称，中国的导弹部队可以在战争爆发后数小时内摧毁美国大部分西太平洋资产。 即使我们希望对中国采取军事选择，我们也被阻止这样做。
哈德逊研究所中国战略中心主任白邦瑞认为，中国有一个秘密计划，旨在取代美国成为世界领先的超级大国，但其高科技军事建设并不是什么秘密。 中国已经展示了击沉美国船只和致盲美国卫星的能力。 中国的火箭、潜艇、电子对抗和防空系统的结合使我们的西太平洋军事资产坐以待毙。 几年前我们失去了南海。 不出所料，菲律宾于2020年2月单方面退出了与美国的联合防御协议。 当我们在亚洲最古老的盟友走向彼岸时，我们应该问自己：为什么？
中国的全球野心也不是什么秘密。 它旨在将欧亚大陆纳入数万亿美元的“一带一路”倡议下的中国经济圈，并利用其5G宽带优势引领第四次工业革命。 自2011年以来，华为网站一直在宣传中国的全球经济霸主计划； 过去十年来，中国在每次电信会议上都大张旗鼓地宣布了这一点，并花费了大量资金。 中国的军事野心固然重要，但其经济和技术愿景却屈从于其宏大的经济和技术愿景，以至于美国分析人士缺乏洞察力。
美国战略家似乎认为我们面对的是 20 世纪 80 年代的苏联。 如果真那么容易就好了！ 共产主义是一种破产的意识形态，是社会和经济组织的悲惨失败。 中国则完全不同。 苏联共产党人告诉他们最有才华的科学家，“发明一些新东西，我们会给你一枚奖章，也许还会给你一座别墅。” 中国说，“发明新东西，发起首次公开募股，并成为亿万富翁。” 截至 2019 年底，中国有 285 名亿万富翁，其中包括阿里巴巴的马云，他和许多其他亿万富翁一样，是一名共产党员。 马萨诸塞州剑桥市的马克思主义者比整个中国还要多。 几年前，我在北京吃晚饭时遇到了一位自称马克思主义者的人，他是一位在共产党干部学校教授马克思列宁主义学说的令人愉快的家伙。 他的女儿刚刚从美国顶尖大学毕业； 他问我是否可以帮助她在华尔街找到一份工作。
我们面对的不是醉酒、腐败的苏联官僚，而是从世界上最大国家最聪明的大学毕业生中精心挑选的普通话精英。 美国面临着比腐朽的马克思主义更令人畏惧的事情：一个拥有 5000 年历史的帝国，它务实、好奇、适应能力强、冷酷无情，而且饥渴难耐。 中国现在的政权是残酷的，但并不比在长城里埋葬百万劳工的秦朝更残酷。 中国过去是、现在仍然是极其残酷的。
华为为新中华帝国提供了模板。 该公司击败了竞争对手并雇佣了他们的人才。 它在移动宽带研发领域占据主导地位，因为其 5 万名外国员工从事大部分基础研究。 中国在其悠久的历史上第一次成功地吸收了足够数量的西方科学和工程精英，并利用他们实现其全球野心。
移动宽带只是一个开始。 中国的目标是掌控经济生活各个领域的“控制点”。 想象一下工业机器人，它们通过 5G 网络相互通信，并利用人工智能来设计生产技术，无需人工输入； 利用不断更新的生命体征和十亿人的遗传历史进行医疗诊断； 采矿机器人由身穿白大褂、戴着虚拟现实护目镜的技术人员指挥； 宽带和人工智能的结合使其他十几种颠覆性技术成为可能。
中国乞讨、借用和窃取了使其经济规模与美国相当的技术。 它每年支付 360 亿美元的知识产权使用费——但它的账单应该要大得多。 公然盗窃包括波音 C-17 军用运输机的计划，该计划被中国黑客窃取并用于制造山寨机 Y-20 运输机。 其他计划则由受雇于西方的中国工程师实施，他们学习了雇主的技术，并在走出去时掌握了复制这些技术的技能。 还有更多的计划是由渴望进入中国市场的西方公司简单地交给的，并乐意放弃家族珠宝以换取特权。 这对他们的长期竞争力不利，但对首席执行官五年内的股票期权有利。
中国从美国窃取的最重要的东西是一个伟大的理念，它使美国在苏联解体后成为世界上唯一的超级大国。 这个想法是通过积极追求先进的武器系统来推动基础研发，并让副产品渗透到民用经济。 中国就像一个两级火箭。 在邓小平的改革之后，出口驱动型、廉价劳动力经济将中国从一个贫穷的农村国家变成了一个繁荣的城市化巨人。 中国十年前就开始抛弃这个助推器。 下一阶段是华为的第四次工业革命，由人工智能、机器人、互联网和海量大数据应用到供应链管理、交通、医疗等领域。
大黄蜂的飞行
美国对中国全球野心的回应失败了。 这次失败有两个重要原因。 首先，我们长期低估中国的能力和野心。 其次，我们没有解决好我们自己的问题。 中国设想建立一个虚拟帝国，其中改变游戏规则的技术主导生产、采购、金融和运输。 它在基础研究、科学教育和基础设施方面投入了大量资源。 相比之下，美国对基础研究和科学教育的承诺已缩减至里根政府时期的一半左右。
中国经济就像一只大黄蜂，本不该飞，但它却飞了。 美国评论家很难解释中国的成功，因此他们假装它不存在，或者即使存在，也不会存在太久。 例如，特朗普在 2019 年 7 月 30 日发推文称，“中国表现非常糟糕，是 27 年来最糟糕的一年……” 在过去的三年里，我们的经济规模比中国经济大得多。”
谁的经济更大，就看你的衡量标准了。 以美元计算，美国的规模要大得多。 但如果算上商品和服务的相对成本，根据世界银行的购买力平价衡量标准，中国经济比美国大约 4 万亿美元。 这说明中国国内价格远低于美国价格。 2019年8月，从成都机场打车半小时，花费了我大约5美元。 在美国任何一个城市，花费都是 50 到 70 美元。 以现价美元计算，中国 2018 年 GDP 约为 13 万亿美元，而美国则超过 20 万亿美元，但购买力平价是一个更具信息性的衡量标准。
一个30岁的中国人的消费量几乎是他出生时父亲或母亲的十倍。 那些在泥土地板和户外厕所的家庭中长大的中国人现在住在有中央供暖和室内管道的公寓里。 曾经省钱购买自行车的中国人现在也能买得起汽车了。 中国政府的数据是否是为了让事情看起来更好而造假？ 不要指望它。 电力生产、货运量和主要工业项目生产等经济活动的基本指标是可验证的，并且它们密切跟踪报告的GDP增长。 中国已建成世界上最长的高速公路系统（约90,000英里）、世界上最大的高铁网络（目前约18,000英里，到2025年将增至24,000英里），以及足够的住房将近6亿人从农村转移到城市 。 30年前，这些都不存在。 中国的基础设施是现代世界的奇迹。 与中国的机场、公路、铁路相比，美国大部分地区看起来就像是第三世界国家。
目前，中国毕业生的科学家和工程师数量比美国、欧洲、日本、台湾和韩国的总和还多，是美国的六倍。 过去十年，中国科学教育的质量已达到世界水平。 20世纪60年代毛泽东的文化大革命几乎摧毁了中国的大学体系。 得益于美国研究生院，中国大学聚集了世界一流的科学和工程师资队伍。 美国计算机科学和电气工程领域五分之四的博士学位授予外国学生，其中中国学生是最大的群体。
只有 5% 的美国本科生主修工程，这意味着最近获得博士学位的教师职位并不多。
很难衡量中国 STEM 教育与世界其他地区的相对质量。 （伦敦）《泰晤士报高等教育增刊》将五所中国大学列入世界前 50 名工程技术学校排名。 中国科技公司的高管告诉我，他们不愿意雇用拥有美国大学学士学位的中国毕业生。 他们认为，中国的课程更加严格，出国留学的中国学生可能是富裕家庭的孩子，但在中国高考中成绩不佳。
中国不再需要窃取或复制西方技术。 过去五年，中国生产了世界上最好的5G设备、一些世界上最快的超级计算机、超高速战略导弹、可与美国最好的设计相媲美的计算机芯片，以及无法破解的网络安全技术——量子密码学。 2019 年，中国机器人航天器首次在月球背面软着陆。这仅仅是开始。
研究和债务
中国目前的研发支出约占 GDP 的 2.2%，而美国为 2.8%，但考虑到我们经济的相对规模，他们的研发支出绝对值与我们大致相同。 一个很大的区别在于支出的构成。 大多数美国研发部门寻求对现有产品进行渐进式改进——升级的洗衣粉或咸味较少的罐装汤。 正如五角大楼在 2019 年中国军事能力评估中所解释的那样，中国的研发集中于军民两用技术。 在关键领域，中国的支出比我们多得多。 哈德逊研究所分析师阿瑟·赫尔曼 (Arthur Herman) 2019 年在《华尔街日报》上写道：
北京是美国在量子计算领域的主要竞争对手。 它每年至少花费 25 亿美元用于研究——是华盛顿花费的 10 倍多——并且在合肥省拥有一个大型量子中心。 中国渴望开发密码破译的“杀手级应用程序”，这意味着保护美国数据和网络免受量子入侵是至关重要的安全利益。
华为是移动宽带领域的全球行业领导者，其研发支出超过其主要竞争对手诺基亚和爱立信的总和。
巴布森学院教授托马斯·达文波特表示，中国政府对人工智能的支持让美国的努力“相形见绌”：
2017 年，[中国] 中央政府宣布希望到 2030 年使中国及其产业成为人工智能技术的世界领先者。政府最新的风险投资基金预计将在国有企业的人工智能和相关技术上投资超过 300 亿美元 ，并且该基金加入了规模更大的国家资助的风险投资基金。 仅中国一个国家就表示将投入 50 亿美元用于开发人工智能技术和业务。 北京市已投入 20 亿美元开发人工智能产业园。 主要港口天津计划投资 160 亿美元发展当地人工智能产业……
美国的投资计划（主要是国防工业）与中国的努力相比相形见绌。 美国国防部的研究部门 DARPA 多年来一直赞助人工智能研究和竞赛，并拥有一个名为“AI Next”的 20 亿美元基金，帮助大学和公司开发下一波人工智能技术。 目前尚不清楚其努力取得了多少实际进展。
一些分析人士称，中国经济将遭受债务危机。 但数字并不支持这一观点。 根据国际清算银行的数据，中国和美国的债务负担大致相同。 中国政府、家庭和非金融企业的信贷总额占 GDP 的 261%，美国占 GDP 的 249%。 最大的区别在于谁欠债务。 中国中央政府债务约占GDP的一半，但在美国约占GDP的100%。 相比之下，美国私人企业债务仅占 GDP 的 75% 左右，而中国则占 GDP 的 150% 左右。
诚然，中国的金融体系存在很多问题。 它过度依赖大型国有银行，这些银行习惯于不加询问地向国有企业发放贷款。 这助长了低效率和腐败。 中国当局允许私营企业倒闭，而不是鼓励银行掩盖其问题。 2019 年前 11 个月，有 170 亿美元的中国公司债券违约，与 4.4 万亿美元的境内公司债券市场整体相比，这个数字很小。
不过，大多数中国企业债务都是为基础设施提供资金，而这些基础设施在很大程度上可以支撑债务负担。 中国为基础设施支出提供资金的方式解释了债务集中度差异的大部分原因。 在美国，联邦、州和地方政府通过税收或借款为基础设施支出提供资金； 在中国，国有企业从国有银行借款为基础设施提供资金。
在《亚洲时报》2017 年的一项研究中，我计算出，中国基准股指深圳 300 指数中非金融公司所欠净债务的三分之二仅由 22 家公司所欠。 几乎所有这些都涉及基础设施（能源、通信基础设施、航运、航空或金属）。 这种中国企业债务应被视为中国主权的“公共工程”投资。
在借入与各自经济规模大致相同的金额后，中国和美国得到了什么回报？ 美国的国债已超过 20 万亿美元，这还不包括估计还有 46 万亿美元的无资金支持的社会保障和医疗保险负债。 我们把大部分钱都花在了转移支付上。 中国利用债务将5.5亿人从农村转移到城市，并建设了世界上最新、最大的基础设施。
没有快速修复
我们用“帝国”这个词来形容中国，唤起人们对军事征服和殖民占领的记忆。 但中国是一个完全不同的实体：它的目标是同化和间接控制，而不是帝国统治。 它避免了帝国主义对外国军事承诺的过度扩张，并寻求通过贸易和技术的主导地位来锁定其影响力。
美国应对中国没有简单的办法，没有快速解决办法，没有捷径。 世界从未见过像中国这样的全球突破。 它将改变这个星球上每个居民的生活，包括美国人。 俄罗斯革命家托洛茨基（Leon Trotsky）说过（杜撰的），你可能对战争不感兴趣，但战争对你感兴趣。 中国也是如此。
第二次世界大战后，美国人仅仅因为是美国人而获得报酬。 整个世界都必须来到我们身边。 我们拥有唯一的深度资本市场、唯一的风险投资家、唯一能够投入大量资源支持基础研发的国防机构，以及唯一准备将创新转化为产品的熟练劳动力。 我们发明了数字时代的每一个组成部分：半导体、显示器、传感器、激光器、网络和互联网本身。 美国公司在数十个领域享有自然垄断。 我们的商品和服务以溢价出售。 美元为王。 当我在里根第一届政府期间住在德国时，德国基地的美国士兵用陆军工资购买了宝马。
1960年，美国的GDP占世界的40%。 现在它的产量为24%。 更重要的是美国在高科技工业生产中所占份额的下降：根据世界银行的数据，美国的份额从1999年的18%下降到2014年的7%，而中国则从3%上升到26%。 美国对高科技制造业的承诺随着 2000 年的科技泡沫而崩溃，再也没有恢复过。 在接下来的 20 年里，美国家庭的收入几乎没有增长，这并非巧合。
中国面临的挑战是艰巨的。 我们正在与14亿聪明勤劳的人民竞争。 中国学童早上 7:30 到校，下午 5:00 离开。 每年有 1000 万中国青少年参加高考，两年内每天准备 12 个小时，以获得一所好大学的录取。 亚洲人的职业道德解释了为什么美国常春藤盟校的学生中有 28% 是亚洲人，尽管亚洲人仅占美国人口的 5.6%。 我们为中国大学培养了世界一流的工程师资队伍，其中最好的师资水平与美国最好的大学不相上下。
但我们已经远远超出了通过中美技术能力的一对一比较就能解释战略平衡的地步。 中国已招募了数十万名西方最优秀的科学家和技术人员。 华为创造了中国历史上独一无二的商业模式，拥有5万名外籍员工，并在二十几个西方国家设有研究中心。 它不是一家中国公司，而是一家帝国公司，是一种由技术驱动的群体，会产生滚雪球效应。 随着它的成长，它会压垮竞争对手并吸收他们的人才。
1258 年，巴格达落入蒙古人之手，这就是一个真实的教训。 这座拥有 100 万人口的城市躲在 18 英尺高的城墙后面，阿拔斯王朝哈里发穆斯塔西姆拒绝了蒙古人的进贡要求。 阿拔斯王朝认为，蒙古人是轻装骑兵。 面对巴格达 18 英尺厚的城墙，他们能做什么？ 但蒙古酋长旭烈兀汗带来了1000名中国炮兵专家，他们只用了三个星期就攻破了城墙，之后蒙古人用巴格达居民的头像建造了一座巨大的金字塔。
当然，今天的中国人不是蒙古人，但这个类比是成立的：中国人从西方获得了毁灭我们的技术手段。 中国的批评者抱怨它窃取了西方技术。 更危险的是，中国已经学会了吸收西方最优秀的人才。
美国能否继续成为世界上最强大、生产力和创新力最强的国家？ 我们以前曾面临过这样的挑战——在第二次世界大战期间，当时民主军械库压倒了轴心国； 在太空竞赛期间，我们克服了俄罗斯早期的领先优势，将人类送上了月球； 在里根政府时期，数字革命超越了俄罗斯在军事技术方面虚幻的优势。 我们需要像约翰·F·肯尼迪的登月计划和里根的战略防御计划那样做出全国性的努力，以恢复美国在高科技制造和军事应用方面的决定性优势。 如果我们不这样做——如果中国超越美国——我们就会陷入二流地位，就像20世纪的英国一样。 我们将变得更穷、更弱、更不安全。 选择权是我们的，至少在一段时间内是这样。
大卫·P·戈德曼 (David P. Goldman) 是《亚洲时报》的副主编、克莱蒙特研究所美国生活方式中心的华盛顿研究员，以及最近出版的《你将...》一书的作者.
The Chinese Challenge, America has never faced such an adversary
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.
