It’s universal now–every major Western publication and foreign policy intellectual has accepted that China has turned out very differently than anyone expected in 1978, 40 years ago, when Jimmy Carter signed an agreement to normalize relations with China’s Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese are trying to leapfrog us technologically, they are projecting hard military power, they are not accepting the post-World War II world order and they are veering into an authoritarian state that completely represses any individual’s desire for political freedom.
This is something I’ve been thinking about since covering the first moves to modernize China’s economy from Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 1979-1980 and then moving on to become UPI’s Beijing bureau chief in 1981. It was a grand gamble. It would have been one reality if China had chosen the path we expected–gradual erosion of the state’s enterprises and the rise of a private sector; an acceptance of a U.S.-dominated world military order; a gradual increase in a burgeoning middle class’s demand for greater political expression; and an Internet that allowed individuals to challenge practices they deemed unfair. Call that the soft option.
What we are getting instead under President Xi Jinping is a hard China–and there is an astonishing silence on what the United States should do about it. As the world’s second largest economy, there is no way we can tell China what to do or persuade it to alter its behavior. The only choice is to figure out a strategy to defend our interests and our values. If we want to do that, we will have to face up to some issues that have long bedeviled us and been the source of ideological and political gridlock. But I think the shock value of what Xi Jinping is doing is sufficient that it’s not ridiculous to consider these actions:
–Get serious about education. Americans fundamentally don’t believe that they need to be highly educated to make decent livings. And our schools have been caught in a political struggle. Democrats like to support schools because they tend to support unions and Democrats; Republicans try to starve schools of funding for precisely that reason–they are considered the political opposition. If we want to hold our heads high in a world that is dominated by technology, we need a massive new bipartisan commitment to education and particularly to those types of education that create engineers and scientists.
–Adopt industrial policies. China is making rapid progress in key technologies such as solar power, Artificial Intelligence, genetic editing, autonomous driving, drones, supercomputers, satellites and other fields because the government has announced a Made in China 2025 policy and is pouring massive resources into these fields. Because of their large population and because of an absence of hangups over privacy and such, the Chinese show signs of being able to develop these technologies before we do. We need more public-private partnerships and consortia like Sematech, which President Bush created in the late 1980s to counter Japan’s effort to dominate the field. When Americans are threatened, we can find ways to cooperate with each other as we did during the Manhattan Project, Nixon’s war on cancer, and other national priorities.
–Reorganize government. One of the reasons we do not adequately promote American exports and do not provide adequate job training and retraining is that our governmental structure is fragmented and unfocused. On training and retraining, for example, there are something like 14 programs spread over the Department of Labor and Education. There are all sorts of bureaucratic rivalries that get in the way. We need one agency for training and retraining. We need one agency for promoting exports and that would include the Commerce Department, parts of the Small Business Administration and the Export-Import Bank. Let’s get serious.
–Create more win-win technology clusters. We need more Silicon Valleys and we Americans have a unique set of capabiltiies in this regard. Many other hot spots have sprung up in San Diego, Austin, Dallas, Orlando and other places. But we need more fully developed clusters and bigger ones. The formula for how to create these clusters is clear. All the players have to create an ecosystem of opportunity. It’s a question of whether we have the will to do it.
–Reorganize defense and intelligence capabilities. It’s clear that the Chinese are pouring massive resources into their military buildup. We need to open up the valves between what our leading technologists are working on and the ability of the military and intelligence agencies to absorb that cutting edge knowledge. Fire some generals if necessary. Kick some butts in the intelligence community to overcome the fragmentation among the CIA, FBI, NSA and others. We need a cohesive, highly sophisticated defense and intelligence sector.
–Stop the hacking. As a corollary, government, universities and businesses need to get serious about stopping the hacking and crypto-thefts from China, North Korea, Russia and elsewhere. This should be a major national priority. We need to better protect our secrets and we need to protect our infrastructure.
–Support basic research. American research efforts into the cutting edge of science have been blunted as corporations shift research dollars to ideas that can be commercialized in the short to medium-term. We need that kind of research but we can’t afford to walk away from basic science. The Chinese, for example, are the largest buyers of genetic decoding machines and devices that allow electron microscopes to examine living tissue at the molecular level. They are going to produce breakthroughs.
–Exploit the national labs. At the same time, get the national labs under the purview of the Department of Energy to get more serious about commercializing technology. There has been a lot of talk about this and some successes, but at the end of the day, the labs have remained primarily focused on military and nuclear research challenges. The need to be able to focus on both talks–defense-related research and commercialization of leading edge ideas. These labs are huge treasure chests of cutting-edge technology.
–Study Chinese. I’m not kidding. One reason the Chinese have been able to mount such a dramatic rise is that millions of them learned English. Their capacity with our language far exceeds our ability with theirs, even adjusted for the large population difference. (1.4 billion versus 300 million.)
I feel that if we could get serious about such an agenda, we could generate wealth and military power and retain our position in the world, economically and strategically. The Chinese obviously do not share our values and they are projecting their own values in the world, which essentially revolve around power. Do we want to see much of the world transformed into Chinese colonies?
