Coming to grips with a rising China

Since the end of World War II, and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has been an article of faith that the United States is the world’s preeminent power, in every domain, including economic, political and military. With China’s talented population four times larger than the U.S., its vast natural resources strategically positioned in Eurasia, and its unique adaptation of market economics, it has significant potential to shatter those long-held assumptions of U.S. national security strategy.

The United States will only be able to do so much to punch above its weight in any long-term economic competition with China. Size matters. A market economy of 1.4 billion educated people controlled by authoritarian values will have inevitable advantages over the United States with a population one quarter the size, no matter how talented and dynamic…

China’s form of totalitarianism more closely follows the old fascist model of Germany, Japan and Italy than it does Soviet communism. China systematically stifles political dissent and free speech at home, while managing a non-transparent market economy.

Its advanced facial and voice recognition systems have been used to create the world’s largest domestic surveillance network and were used recently to locate and apprehend a BBC reporter in just seven minutes.