The cold war between the US and the Soviet Union was a titanic 45-year ideological, economic and technological struggle that took the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon, touched almost every country and stretched to the moon.
The cold war developing between the US and China is a very different kind of competition in a very different era, but may be no less dangerous and consequential. For the US, China will be a far more formidable foe, given its demographic weight and technological ambition.
The struggle will certainly be more complex and multi-dimensional. While the US and the Soviet Union were hermetically separate, the US and China are intimately entangled in economic, technological and cultural terms.
China was the US’s biggest goods trading partner in 2018. TikTok, the video sharing network owned by China’s ByteDance, is currently the world’s most downloaded non-gaming app, with a big presence in the US. Some 369,548 Chinese students were enrolled in US higher education in 2019. President Xi Jinping’s daughter graduated from Harvard university in 2014.
The superpower rivalry between the US and China has also acquired a different, and possibly decisive, new dimension: cyber. If cold war 1.0 revolved around military hardware and the threat of nuclear annihilation, then cold war 2.0 is more about civil software and technological innovation.
The internet is emerging as a technology of control, not just communication. Whoever runs the global Internet of Things, connecting billions of devices, will have a geostrategic advantage. And China is strengthening its position: the row over the use of Huawei equipment in the 5G networks of several western countries is a taste of things to come.
It is tempting to believe that the bellicose talk between the US and China results from the personal politics of two atypical and disruptive national leaders, US President Donald Trump and Mr Xi, and will not survive their passing.
But Orville Schell, one of America’s leading China scholars, takes a bleaker view. He argues the US policy of engagement towards China that endured for almost 50 years through eight Republican and Democratic presidential administrations has died. The best that can be hoped for, he writes, is the US and China remain in the foothills of a new cold war, rather than ascending its peaks.
In Mr Schell’s view, US engagement was based on two assumptions, which have both failed the test of time. First, Washington was convinced that increased prosperity and greater interaction with the world would lead to China’s democratisation. Later, it believed the internet would further accelerate societal freedom. In 2000 Bill Clinton, then president, suggested China’s attempts to crack down on the internet would be “like trying to nail jello to the wall”.
The world looks different today. China has emerged as the world’s second-biggest economy without loosening the Communist party’s grip on power. And the Great Firewall of China has blocked off the global internet, while enabling Beijing to mess around in others’ cyber backyards. Last week, Twitter culled 23,750 accounts that it claimed were part of a co-ordinated propaganda campaign run by China. “We are in a competition that need not be a shooting war to be just as dangerous for us,” Stanley McChrystal, the former US general, warned last week.
Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank, argues that China has already overtaken the US in some advanced industries and is investing heavily to achieve technological supremacy. “China is becoming more powerful technologically and can easily surpass the US if we do not act,” he says.
To respond, Mr Atkinson argues the US urgently needs to develop a national industrial strategy. The widespread belief that free markets, property rights and entrepreneurial spirit will be enough to guarantee success is “ahistorical and naive”.
At the height of the cold war in 1963, the US federal government spent more on research and development than the rest of the world’s public and private sectors combined, Mr Atkinson says. Today, it spends less on R&D as a proportion of gross domestic product than it did in 1955.
The irony is that China’s leaders may have learnt more from American history and its victory in the first cold war than has the US political class. Technological innovation is a national security issue.
