The current trade war between the US and China looks like a small piece in a much larger puzzle over world leadership in which China plays the part of the ascending challenger seeking to upset the existing balance of power. Technology and innovation seem to be Beijing’s weapons of choice in its frontal assault on Washington in sectors traditionally led by the US. China is not only acquiring technology. Its ambitions include the regulation of international trade and global governance. Just what a China-led global order would look like is still unclear, but the inherent side-effects of technology need to be meticulously assessed, as they have the potential to alter the core values of modern societies. To what extent will technology facilitate China’s rise?

The global implications of China's rise as a global actor In 2005, a senior official in the George W. Bush administration expressed the hope that China would emerge as a “responsible stakeholder” on the world stage. A dozen years later, the Trump administration dramatically shifted course, instead calling China a “strategic competitor” whose actions routinely threaten U.S. interests. Both assessments reflected an underlying truth: China is no longer just a “rising” power. It has emerged as a truly global actor, both economically and militarily. Every day its actions affect nearly every region and every major issue, from climate change to trade, from conflict in troubled lands to competition over rules that will govern the uses of emerging technologies. To better address the implications of China's new status, both for American policy and for the broader international order, Brookings scholars conducted research over the past two years, culminating in a project: Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World. The project is intended to furnish policy makers and the public with hard facts and deep insights for understanding China's regional and global ambitions. The initiative draws not only on Brookings's deep bench of China and East Asia experts, but also on the tremendous breadth of the institution's security, strategy, regional studies, technological, and economic development experts. Areas of focus include the evolution of China's domestic institutions; great power relations; the emergence of critical technologies; Asian security; China's influence in key regions beyond Asia; and China's impact on global governance and norms. Global China: Assessing China's Growing Role in the World provides the most current, broad-scope, and fact-based assessment of the implications of China's rise for the United States and the rest of the world.

China is not only acquiring technology. Its ambitions include the regulation of international trade and global governance.

After a century of humiliation, a century of hard work in reconstructing and modernizing an extremely poor and backward country, with a huge population and an ancient civilization, when New China was founded in October 1949. After eradicating absolute/extreme poverty in 2020, the Chinese nation of 1.4 billion has advanced further on the path to common prosperity by mid-21st century. China will complete its Four Modernizations of agriculture, industry, defense, science & technology (S&T) by 2050. A world-class military will also then protect the country’s sovereignty and integrity as well as safeguard national interests. Together with construction of ecological civilization to host and support harmonious co-existence between humanity and nature, a fully restored and rejuvenated Beautiful China will embrace the whole world with open arms in the spirit of international friendship and goodwill, and cooperate to co-develop in peace for the common good as well as a shared future for all nations. At the vanguard of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, China will further drive its own dramatic transformation at the heart of convergence of emerging and disruptive technologies ignited and sustained by AI, big data, biotechnology, etc. in the new era. In the latest round of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), China has been innovating and leading in the intelligentization of military forces. Some observers have viewed the visionary technological move as a stratagem to “capture the decisive advantage” in global geopolitical competition. Combining three volumes on China’s present and future developments, CHINA FUTURE TRILOGY comprises: (1) CHINA IN 2030, highlighting the rise to the world’s economic leadership and acceleration of military modernization; (2) CHINA TOWARDS 2035 on milestones which feature basic completion of agricultural, economic and military modernizations as well as building a Beautiful China in “a further 15 years of hard work” (to quote President Xi Jinping) from 2020 to 2035; and (3) CHINA VISION 2050, on the way to the great goal of complete and comprehensive national development, modernization and rejuvenation. The story of New China is indeed an extraordinary epic of miraculous national transformation in the most truly revolutionary period in history.

What new directions in China’s digital economy mean for us all China is the largest homogenous digital market on Earth: unified by language, culture, and mobile payments. Not only a consumer market of unrivaled size, it’s also a vast and hyperactive innovation ecosystem for new technologies. And as China’s digital economy moves from a consumer-focused phase to an enterprise-oriented one, Chinese companies are rushing to capitalize on ways the newer wave of tech—the Internet of Things, AI, blockchain, cloud computing, and data analytics (iABCD)—can unlock value for their businesses from non-traditional angles. In China’s Data Economy, Winston Ma—investment professional, capital markets attorney, adjunct professor of digital economy, and bestselling author—details the profound global implications of this new direction, including how Chinese apps for services such as food delivery expand so quickly they surpass their U.S. models within a couple of years, and how the sheer scale and pace of Chinese innovation might lead to an AI arms race in which China and the U.S. vie aggressively for leadership. How China’s younger netizens participate in their evolving digital economy as consumers, creators, and entrepreneurs Why Online/Office (OMO, Online-merge-with-Offline) integration is viewed as the natural next step on from the O2O (Online-to-Offline) model used in the rest of the world The ways in which traditional Chinese industries such as retail, banking, and insurance are innovating to stay in the game What emerging markets can learn from China as they leapfrog past the personal computer age altogether, diving straight into the mobile-first economy Anyone interested in what’s next for Chinese digital powerhouses—investors, governments, entrepreneurs, international business players—will find this an essential guide to what lies ahead as China’s flexes new digital muscles to create new forms of value and challenge established tech giants across the world.

AI Superpowers is Kai-Fu Lee's New York Times and USA Today bestseller about the American-Chinese competition over the future of artificial intelligence.

This book analyzes China’s foreign technology acquisition activity and how this has helped its rapid rise to superpower status. Since 1949, China has operated a vast and unique system of foreign technology spotting and transfer aimed at accelerating civilian and military development, reducing the cost of basic research, and shoring up its power domestically and abroad—without running the political risks borne by liberal societies as a basis for their creative developments. While discounted in some circles as derivative and consigned to perpetual catch-up mode, China’s "hybrid" system of legal, illegal, and extralegal import of foreign technology, combined with its indigenous efforts, is, the authors believe, enormously effective and must be taken seriously. Accordingly, in this volume, 17 international specialists combine their scholarship to portray the system’s structure and functioning in heretofore unseen detail, using primary Chinese sources to demonstrate the perniciousness of the problem in a manner not likely to be controverted. The book concludes with a series of recommendations culled from the authors’ interactions with experts worldwide. This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese politics, US foreign policy, intelligence studies, science and technology studies, and International Relations in general.

For more than a century, no US adversary or coalition of adversaries - not Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union - has ever reached sixty percent of US GDP. China is the sole exception, and it is fast emerging into a global superpower that could rival, if not eclipse, the United States. What does China want, does it have a grand strategy to achieve it, and what should the United States do about it? In The Long Game, Rush Doshi draws from a rich base of Chinese primary sources, including decades worth of party documents, leaked materials, memoirs by party leaders, and a careful analysis of China's conduct to provide a history of China's grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Taking readers behind the Party's closed doors, he uncovers Beijing's long, methodical game to displace America from its hegemonic position in both the East Asia regional and global orders through three sequential "strategies of displacement." Beginning in the 1980s, China focused for two decades on "hiding capabilities and biding time." After the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, it became more assertive regionally, following a policy of "actively accomplishing something." Finally, in the aftermath populist elections of 2016, China shifted to an even more aggressive strategy for undermining US hegemony, adopting the phrase "great changes unseen in century." After charting how China's long game has evolved, Doshi offers a comprehensive yet asymmetric plan for an effective US response. Ironically, his proposed approach takes a page from Beijing's own strategic playbook to undermine China's ambitions and strengthen American order without competing dollar-for-dollar, ship-for-ship, or loan-for-loan.

Techno-Geopolitics explores contemporary U.S.–China relations and the future of global cyber-security through the prisms of geopolitics and financial-technological competition. It puts forward a new conceptual framework for an emerging field of digital statecraft and discusses a range of key issues including the controversies around 5G technology, policy regulations over TikTok and WeChat, the emergence of non-traditional espionage, and potential trends in post-pandemic foreign policy. Analysing the ramifications of the ongoing U.S.–China trade standoff, this book maps the terrain of technological war and the race for global technological leadership and economic supremacy. It shows how China’s technological advancements not only have been the key to its national economic development but also have been the core focus of U.S. intelligence. Further, it draws on U.S.–China counterintelligence cases sourced from the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to explore emerging patterns and techniques of China’s espionage practice. A cutting-edge study on the future of statecraft, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of international relations, security and intelligence studies, information technology and artificial intelligence and political science, especially U.S. foreign policy and China studies. It will also be of great interest to policymakers, career bureaucrats, security and intelligence practitioners, technology regulators, and professionals working with think tanks and embassies.

China is surging in the tech race — and will continue to outperform the United States. The rising power has done exceptionally in Super Apps, bullet trains, 5G, electric vehicles, digital currency, smart cities, blockchain applications, and quantum communications in space, among others. Its payment platforms are increasingly adopted along the entire Silk Road.The genesis of this book was to discover an 'Apollo Program' for the US to catch up in these areas, but we discovered a much deeper need for a social/mental health Apollo Program for millennials who are bogged down by a host of under-appreciated and intertwined issues which cause anxiety and alienation and lead to massive losses in workplace productivity. This book proposes two Apollo programs — one for tech and one for millennials — by a millennial. Strategies for cracking the highly competitive Chinese Super App ecommerce market are also revealed.Related Link(s)