Americans are not paying much attention to China’s achievements in landing a spacecraft on the dark side of the moon and on landing an explorer on Mars. What these events signify, however, is that China has made stunningly fast technological progress and has reached parity with the United States in many crucial respects.
Compare and contrast American attitudes today with the shock that Americans felt when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Americans quickly realized that we had an international rival with huge ambitions and abilities. It galvanized Americans to mount a systematic, national response. John F. Kennedy declared the objective of putting a man on the moon, a goal that was achieved only nine years later in 1969.
Consider just the communications piece of what China has achieved. Being able to communicate with and control a rover on the surface of Mars requires huge sophistication in computing and telecommunications skills. On Earth, we are seeing similar sophistication in how Huawei builds telecommunications sytems, including “Smart Cities” systems that allow governments to monitor many functions such as garbage and water, but also come equipped with AI-powered facial recognition cameras that help control populations.
We are also seeing surprising sophistication in how Chinese spy agencies and various affiliates have made fools of America’s technology giants such as Microsoft, which suspects a Chinese partner leaked sensitive security details that allowed a breach of its Exchange servers. See details of that here. I suspect that Amazon, Apple and others have had their IT systems compromised, as BusinessWeek magazine has alleged in two major stories starting in 2018. And as I reported in National Interest with Mike McLauglin of the Pentagon’s CyberCommand, China has enacted a new law that gives it unfettered access to the computer systems that foreign companies operate in China, meaning they can use those systems to break into the companies’ international systems. See that story here.
I suspect the key to why America has not reacted with greater urgency is that we had no significant business and economic relationship with the Soviet Union. But we have effectively merged our economy with that of China. Our companies are making enormous amounts of money in China. So they have turned a blind eye to national security considerations. That’s the government’s problem, not ours. That’s a recipe for disaster,
As I argued in “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States” and will soon argue again in the forthcoming “A Grand Strategy: Countering China, Taming Technology, and Restoring the Media,” Americans must coalesce around a strategy that allows us to maintain the technological and therefore military power to resist being colonized by a China intent on doing precisely that.
