Steve Clean Know-how, Innovation, and Nice Energy Competitors – Class 2 – China

This text first appeared in West Level’s Trendy Struggle Institute.

We simply had our second week of our new nationwide safety class at Stanford – Know-how, Innovation and Nice Energy Competitors. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the category to cowl how expertise will form all the weather of nationwide energy (our affect and footprint on the world stage).

Meet up with the category by studying our intro to the category and summaries of Courses 1, 3, 4, 5 6, 7 and 8.)

A key focus of the category is the return of Nice Energy competitors. This isn’t a difficulty of which nation is available in first, it’s about what the world-order will appear to be for the remainder of the century and past. Will or not it’s a rules-based order the place states cooperate to pursue a shared imaginative and prescient for a free and open area and the place the sovereignty of all international locations giant and small is protected below worldwide legislation? Or will another imaginative and prescient for an autocratic and dystopian future be coerced and imposed by revisionist powers set on disrupting the U.S. led worldwide order- an order that has introduced the world unprecedented peace and prosperity because the finish of the Second World Struggle?

All of which results in as we speak’s matter – China.

Class 2 Required Readings

• Matt Pottinger, “Beijing’s American Hustle: How Chinese language Grand Technique Exploits U.S. Energy” International Affairs (September/October 2021)
• Daniel Tobin, “How Xi Jinping’s “New Period” Ought to have Ended the U.S. Debate on Beijing’s Ambitions”Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research, Might 2020
• Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Why Are There No Biographies of Xi Jinping?” The Atlantic, January 2021
• Xi Jinping, “Uphold and Develop Socialism with Chinese language Traits,” (speech delivered on January 5, 2013, printed in Qiushi (“Searching for Fact”), the Central Occasion College’s essential theoretical journal, below Xi’s identify on April 1, 2019, and translated in Palladium Journal in Might 2019).
• New York Instances, Nicholas Kristof, “In search of a Leap-Begin in China” New York Instances, January 5, 2013
  • [Kristof wrote this OpEd on the same day of Xi’s speech (above), which was kept secret by the Chinese Communist Party until it was published in April 2019. Read these two documents side-by-side.]
• Central Committee of the Communist Occasion of China’s Normal Workplace, “Communique on the Present State of the Ideological Sphere” (aka ‘Doc #9’) ChinaFile, April 22, 2013 (translated by ChinaFile and printed November 8, 2013)
• Tanner Greer, “China Does Not Need Your Guidelines Primarily based Order” The Scholar’s Stage, June 4, 2016.
• Kurt Campbell and Eli Ratner, “The China Reckoning: How Beijing Defied America’s Expectations”International Affairs, March/April 2018
• John Garnaut and Invoice Bishop, Sinocism, “Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China” Sinocism, January 16, 2019
• S. Government Workplace of the President, “United States Strategic Method to the Folks’s Republic of China” Trump Advertministration, Might 26, 2020.
• Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), “The China problem and important subsequent steps for america” Brookings, Might 15, 2019
• Rob Atkinson, “Innovation Drag: The Influence of Chinese language Financial and Commerce Insurance policies on World Innovation,” ITIF, January 2020.
• “Army and Safety Developments Involving the Peoples Republic of China 2021” U.S. Division of Protection

Class 2- Studying Task Questions

Choose one of many beneath questions and reply in roughly 100 phrases, primarily based on the required readings.

• To what diploma does the Folks’s Republic of China have an overarching grand technique, based on the readings? Do you agree or disagree with the arguments of the readings and why? Even when China does have a grand technique, is it potential for China to take care of coherent, constant execution of its technique? Why or why not?
• What are the CCP’s aims concerning the worldwide system? What devices of nationwide energy does the CCP make use of to attain which particular impacts so as to obtain its aims?

Class 2-  Dialogue Questions

• What’s the Chinese language Communist Occasion (CCP) making an attempt to attain? What are its targets and aims? What’s Xi Jinping making an attempt to attain? To what extent are Xi’s targets congruent with the broader CCP’s targets?
• How does the CCP and/or Xi view the present worldwide system?
• From the CCP’s perspective, what are the principle obstacles standing in the way in which of attaining the aim of “Nationwide Rejuvenation”?
• What position does ideology play within the CCP’s technique?
• In what methods are the CCP’s targets appropriate and/or incompatible with U.S. nationwide pursuits?
• In what domains does the competitors between america and the Folks’s Republic of China play out? How do these domains work together with each other?

Class 2- Visitor Audio system

Our audio system for our second class have been Matt Pottinger and Matt Turpin.

Matt Pottinger, was a former Deputy Nationwide Safety Advisor and former Nationwide Safety Council Senior Director for Asia. As a former Marine, Matt had 3 fight deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Previous to becoming a member of the Marine Corps, Matt was a reporter in China, first at Reuters, then on the Wall Avenue Journal.

Matt Turpin, was a former Nationwide Safety Council Director for China and the Senior Advisor on China to U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Earlier than getting into the White Home, Turpin served over 22 years within the U.S. Military. Amongst different Indo-Pacific targeted roles, he served as a China advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Employees on the Pentagon and assisted the Deputy Secretary of Protection with the Protection Innovation Initiative, inspecting the position of innovation in U.S. protection coverage.

Lecture 2

If you happen to can’t see the slides click on right here.

Slides 7-10 are chosen quotes from our assigned studying. Our lecture and dialogue (slides 11-16) took us by means of the evolution of the hopes the U.S. had for its four-decade-long technique of diplomatic and financial engagement with China. The hope was that serving to China develop its economic system would result in liberalization of its authorities and larger freedoms for its individuals. Deng Xiaoping stated China wanted to “disguise our capabilities, bide our time.” Over time, Xi has moved China to a extra overt and aggressive part, now not hiding its intention to problem the West. As we found, China’s agenda all the time had been radically completely different than ours. The rising realization during the last 5 years is that our hopes for China to democratize because it developed economically have been terribly naïve. What we’ve come to comprehend is that China has been enjoying a decades-long sport to problem and overturn the U.S.-led liberal worldwide order and change it with a neo-totalitarian mannequin.

Realizing this, 4 years in the past the U.S. reoriented from a concentrate on counter terrorism to a brand new emphasis on nice energy competitors with Russia and China. This new effort could be seen within the Interim U.S. Nationwide Safety Technique (which outlines the most important U.S. nationwide safety considerations and the way we plan to cope with them) and 2018 Nationwide Protection Technique  (which identifies the priorities and capabilities required by the warfighters to implement the Nationwide Safety Technique).

Related to this course, China is utilizing all parts of nationwide energy: diplomacy (mushy energy, alliances, coercion), data/intelligence (utilizing its financial leverage over Hollywood, controlling the Covid narrative), its navy would possibly and financial energy (Belt and Highway Initiative.) China has exploited western finance and expertise, and has efficiently satisfied Western democracies to prioritize financial cooperation and commerce with China above all else.

At dwelling, China’s use of digital authoritarianism (facial recognition, biometrics, and social credit score) has turned its personal nation right into a surveillance dystopia to make sure that there are not any inner challenges to the supremacy of the Chinese language Communist Occasion (CCP). The CCP’s oppression of the Uyghurs – a Muslim minority within the western province of Xinjiang – is taken into account a genocide by many in addition to a harbinger of what a Chinese language world order will appear to be.

Going ahead, coexistence with China will contain competitors but in addition cooperation. But it surely’s going to take the demonstrated resolve of the U.S. and its allies to proceed to uphold a rules-based order the place nations share a imaginative and prescient of a free and open Indo-Pacific the place the sovereignty of all international locations are revered.

Slides 18-20 dug a bit deeper about why and the way of the group venture. College students shaped groups to work on one of many Nice Energy Competitors points on the intersection of business applied sciences (AI, machine studying, autonomy, biotech, cyber, business entry to house, et al.) and DIME-FIL (Diplomatic, Data, Army and Financial, Finance, Intelligence and Regulation Enforcement.)

Given who our college students are, we assume they will all log on and to the library and write an ideal analysis paper. As we identified to them, when you could be the neatest individual within the constructing, it’s unlikely that 1) that each one the info are within the constructing, 2) you’re smarter than the collective intelligence sitting exterior the constructing.

Our educating assistants (who beforehand took our Hacking for Protection class) shared with the scholars their very own journey of what occurs to early assumptions and the way options evolve if you get out of the constructing.

If you happen to can’t see the Challenge Agrippa slides click on right here.

We would like our college students to construct the reflexes and abilities to deeply perceive an issue by gathering first-hand data and validate that the issue they’re fixing is the true downside, not a symptom of one thing else. Then, college students will start quickly constructing minimal viable options (coverage, software program, {hardware} …) as a method to check and validate their understanding of each the issue and what it might take to resolve it.

And so they thought we have been simply going to have nice lectures.

Subsequent week – Russia

Classes Realized

• The U.S. hoped that serving to China develop its economic system would result in liberalization of its authorities and larger freedoms for its individuals
• China has been enjoying a decades-long sport to problem and overturn the U.S.-led liberal order and change it with a neo-totalitarian mannequin
• College students will collaborate on groups to first perceive after which work to resolve nationwide safety challenges on the intersection of DIME-FIL and dual-use expertise

Filed below: Educating, Know-how Innovation and Trendy Struggle and Nice Energy Competitors |