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.

What does the rise of China represent, and how should the international community respond? With a holistic rereading of Chinese longue durée history, Fei-Ling Wang provides a simple but powerful framework for understanding the nature of persistent and rising Chinese power and its implications for the current global order. He argues that the Chinese ideation and tradition of political governance and world order—the China Order—is based on an imperial state of Confucian-Legalism as historically exemplified by the Qin-Han polity. Claiming a Mandate of Heaven to unify and govern the whole known world or tianxia (all under heaven), the China Order dominated Eastern Eurasia as a world empire for more than two millennia, until the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the People's Republic of China has been a reincarnated Qin-Han polity without the traditional China Order, finding itself stuck in the endless struggle against the current world order and the ever-changing Chinese society for its regime survival and security. Wang also offers new discoveries and assessments about the true golden eras of Chinese civilization, explains the great East-West divergence between China and Europe, and analyzes the China Dream that drives much of current Chinese foreign policy.

Over the last century and a half, global technological leadership has shifted from Great Britain to the United States. In this paper we argue that China is positioning itself to assume global leadership in technology within the coming few decades. We identify three sources of competitive advantage for China's ascent in the global technology stakes: its massive domestic market, its centralized power and willingness to employ state-sponsored industrial policy and government support, and the process of globalization that continues to transform markets worldwide. After acknowledging skeptical views of China's capacity to achieve global technology leadership, we survey the present state of affairs and assess its prospects for growth based on statistical evidence and multiple illustrative examples. We argue that the three sources of competitive advantage we explicate offer China a path to imminent global technological leadership.

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.

The United States and China are locked in a “cold tech war,” and the winner will end up dominating the twenty-first century. Beijing was not considered a tech contender a decade ago. Now, some call it a leader. America is already behind in critical areas. It is no surprise how Chinese leaders made their regime a tech powerhouse. They first developed and then implemented multiyear plans and projects, adopting a determined, methodical, and disciplined approach. As a result, China’s political leaders and their army of technocrats could soon possess the technologies of tomorrow. America can still catch up. Unfortunately, Americans, focused on other matters, are not meeting the challenges China presents. A whole-of-society mobilization will be necessary for the U.S. to regain what it once had: control of cutting-edge technologies. This is how America got to the moon, and this is the key to winning this century. Americans may not like the fact that they’re once again in a Cold War–type struggle, but they will either adjust to that reality or get left behind.

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.