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If the 50 cent bullet was the tool of coercion for the future the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. The Soviets lost not because they could not produce

If the 50 cent bullet was the tool of coercion for the future the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. The Soviets lost not because they could not produce enough bullets, but because they could not keep up with the rapid advance of information technology, computer chips, processors, and supercomputers. China leverages its vast market power to coerce American high tech companies to provide it with the latest technology if they want to conduct business in the People's Republic. China's power is market power, it is the power to request that Google censor news that is harmful to the Communist Party. It is the power to ask Hollywood studios not put the small flag of Taiwan on Tom Cruise's bomber jacket in the new Top Gun movie. The Chinese now have more supercomputers than the United States (188 to 122), and for a few years, they had the fastest supercomputer in the world. These computers allow nations to simulate everything from the weather to nuclear detonations. At the end of the day, China understands better than anyone that control in the future is control over information, not tanks, aircraft carriers, or nuclear tipped ICBMs.

qzw 5y ago
For the first three decades of China’s “opening up”, what they had was not coercive market power but incredibly cheap labor on a huge scale and a stable, pro-business government. And what that government did was to play the long game of requiring all foreign businesses wishing to take advantage of the huge, cheap labor force to do so through joint ventures with domestic companies. For the Chinese people, this was exactly the right move, because foreign businesses would never have voluntarily enriched the Chinese labor force and thus driven up their own costs. China is where it is today because, while the Western companies were planning on the scale of quarters, they were looking decades down the road. However, the rest of the world is finally waking up, and China still has tremendous internal structural challenges to sustaining its growth. So whether China will become a dominant force globally still remains to be seen.

qzw 5y ago

For the first three decades of China’s “opening up”, what they had was not coercive market power but incredibly cheap labor on a huge scale and a stable, pro-business government. And what that government did was to play the long game of requiring all foreign businesses wishing to take advantage of the huge, cheap labor force to do so through joint ventures with domestic companies. For the Chinese people, this was exactly the right move, because foreign businesses would never have voluntarily enriched the Chinese labor force and thus driven up their own costs. China is where it is today because, while the Western companies were planning on the scale of quarters, they were looking decades down the road. However, the rest of the world is finally waking up, and China still has tremendous internal structural challenges to sustaining its growth. So whether China will become a dominant force globally still remains to be seen.