Time: 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Location: Zoom video conferencing app
OPC Past President Bill Holstein will discuss his new book, A Grand Strategy: Countering China, Taming Technology and Restoring the Media, with OPC members on July 7 on Zoom. OPC Governor John Avlon, senior political analyst and anchor at CNN, will lead the discussion.
RSVPs are essential. Please register in advance to receive the link to join about an hour before the program.
Holstein recounts many of his adventures as a foreign correspondent and editor covering South Africa, China, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Germany and Russia. He won an OPC award in 1980 for his coverage of China’s early modernization efforts and later became Beijing bureau chief for United Press International.
China remains a core focus for Holstein to this day. One of the critical issues America faces is the emergence of a much more powerful and, he argues, aggressive China. “Technology has become the central battleground in the global struggle between the United States and China over whose systems and whose values will prevail. It is a technological arms race that far exceeds the Soviet challenge in scale and complexity.”
Big Tech companies is a second central theme. Holstein argues that rather than seeking to break them up, as many are proposing, it would be wiser to preserve a measure of trust between government and the private sector so that they can cooperate to improve America’s information and communications systems, which are riddled by Chinese penetrations, and cooperate on critical technologies of the future such as 5G and 6G wireless telecommunications networks.
Big Tech, Holstein writes, needs to be reined in in terms of its use of “content” from established mainstream media companies and, following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol fueled by social media, it must start taking a measure of responsibility for what it posts and must sharply limit the use of algorithms to fan the flames of hate and divisiveness.
A Grand Strategy is published by Brick Tower Press.
