Good morning.  It’s a distinct pleasure to get all of you started today for your corporate strategy retreat with a discussion of the strategic environment facing the United States and its allies and partners – a topic which I’ll approach through the prism of technology competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  Naturally, these remarks represent only my personal views, and not necessarily those of anyone else in the U.S. Government or elsewhere.  But I hope you’ll find them interesting and thought provoking nonetheless.

The bad news is that we do have formidable challenges ahead.

On the other hand, I also think there are reasons for optimism, particularly if our public and private sector leaders can work together to advance a shared vision of success through partnership against that revisionist autocracy as it seeks to subvert the freedom and autonomy of sovereign peoples everywhere and pull them into its Sinocentric orbit. 

So let me set the geopolitical stage, if you will, for your discussions today by giving you my perspective upon today’s techno-geopolitical challenge.

I.               A Little History

Let’s start with some historical perspective.  Chinese leaders have been all but obsessed for a long time with the geopolitical power that can accrue from having a commanding position in the technological arena, and from the application of technology not merely to boost economic productive capacity but also to augment military capabilities. Frankly, they have some good reasons feel this way.

The scene-setter here is that over many centuries, successive Chinese imperial dynasties had become accustomed to lording it over China’s neighbors in all sorts of ways.  Indeed, at least as many Chinese themselves saw it, China had never encountered another civilization that seemed able to match it in all the facets of its power and glory. 

Even when outside, non-Chinese peoples with superior military capabilities invaded, occupied, and ruled China – as occurred at least twice in history, first with the cavalry armies of the Mongols in the 13^th Century and then when the Ming Dynasty was swallowed up into the “gunpower empire” of the Manchus in the 17^th – Chinese thinkers tended to reconceptualize these subjugations in ways that minimized their impact upon China’s civilizational self-esteem. 

The Mongols and Manchus, for instance, were to some degree retroactively recharacterized as having been merely “Chinese minority” populations, thus recasting the country’s conquest by outsiders as just a kind of intra-familial dispute within China’s great civilization.  It was also claimed that these conquerors quickly realized the inherent superiority of Chinese civilization and became thoroughly Sinicized. 

These were false claims, for in both cases the new rulers retained a distinct cultural identity separate from that of their Chinese subjects, even though they found it understandably expedient to rule the huge Chinese population through Chinese institutions, methods, and officials – and to wrap their regimes’ legitimacy narratives in Chinese cultural colors when dealing with Chinese.  But it was important, politically and psychologically, that Chinese officials make these claims anyway.  Such re-imaginings allowed China to perpetuate the narrative that it remained the unquestioned center of the civilizational world in every way.

But what, you might ask, does this ancient history have to do with technology?  And with our own country’s geopolitical challenges today? 

Well, I mention this because it helps signal the degree to which, as of the mid-19^th Century, China still had a powerfully-felt sense of civilizational self, and of full-spectrum superiority vis-à-vis all other cultures and peoples. 

The translation of China’s name for itself as the “Middle Kingdom,” after all, is not merely a geographic description.  It is an illustration of China’s sense of itself as the moral and political center of all humanity, beyond the borders of which all other societies and cultures gradually receded, with distance, into barbarism and indeed basically sub-human status.

So here comes the link to technology, and to its importance in geopolitical competition today.  That towering Chinese sense of arrogant self-regard was a pretty high place from which to fall, but fall China did.  For in the mid 19^th Century, China ran into problems with a set of outsiders from Europe who indeed proved to be far more militarily powerful than the declining Qing Dynasty, but who also didn’t fit the Chinese script of crude barbarians who, despite all their muscle, were overawed by the gloriousness of Chinese civilization and were thereafter Sinicized and domesticated.

To the contrary, the Europeans who repeatedly embarrassed the Qing in military contests beginning with the first shots of the Opium War in 1839 represented something China hadn’t seen before.  They were an aggressive challenger which at that point in history neither conceded nor had any reason to concede anything whatsoever to the faded Middle Kingdom across the full spectrum of national and civilizational strength and dynamism.  In many ways, at that time, Europe outshone China in economic sophistication, military power, technological creativity, science and medicine, cultural and intellectual dynamism, and civilizational self-confidence. 

So the comparison of the once-proud empire to this dynamic new outside force was, for China, emotionally devastating.  Before long, even Chinese nationalists such as the seminal thinker Liang Qichao at beginning the 20^th Century found themselves echoing what Tsar Nicholas I of Russia had said about the decaying Ottoman Empire – describing it as being the “sick man of Europe.”  Now, Liang said, proud China appeared to be “the sick man of Asia.” 

Being thoroughly bested and outshone by such an adversary was new to China, and the psychic trauma of this encounter upon the Middle Kingdom’s preening self-regard was so great that it still resonates powerfully today, albeit with a good deal encouragement by Chinese government propagandists, in pervasive rhetoric about China having suffered a “Century of Humiliation” at European and then Japanese hands. 

And it is rectifying this humiliation through returning China to a position of global preeminence consistent with that ancient self-esteem that is today the centerpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) dream of China’s “great rejuvenation.”

So here’s my point: Chinese leaders have tended, for many years now, to attribute that humiliation largely to China having fallen behind in technology. 

The European, and later Japanese, imperialism the Qing Dynasty so fatefully encountered wasn’t the sort of “garden-variety” opportunistic self-aggrandizement, if you will, that so many countries and cultures – most certainly including China itself – have displayed throughout recorded history when relative balances of economic and military power present them with the chance to seize some advantage. 

No, it was much more than just that kind of opportunity.  The Europeans of the mid-19^th Century had been, as it were, “supercharged” by the economic and technological explosion of the Industrial Revolution, during which steam-powered machines and modern science had revolutionized industrial and productive activity in Britain and several other European countries. 

This scientific, technological, and industrial-economic effervescence turned the world upside down.  The modern world was, in so many respects, created during the 19^th Century through just these processes. 

These developments also had enormous geopolitical consequences, for they created simply massive differentials in effective power between those with “first-mover” advantages in this first Industrial Revolution and those living elsewhere in the world.

By the 1920s, in fact, Europeans had conquered nearly 85 percent of the planet, with the British Empire alone covering one quarter of the Earth’s surface.  One extraordinary example that I like to use is that of Belgium – a very small and relatively weak European country that nonetheless managed to seize for itself an overseas empire that included one colony, the Belgian Congo, that was about 76 times larger than Belgium itself. 

Thanks to the asymmetries created by the Industrial Revolution, in other words, the 19^th Century was an era of geopolitical power imbalances and imperial expansion unlike any previously seen in human history, and it was played out on a truly global scale, thanks to innovations such as steamship travel, railroads, and the telegraph.

II.             China’s Lessons

So as I see it, China’s leaders today have drawn at least two big lessons from their country’s experience with the “supercharging” effect of the Industrial Revolution upon European power in the 19^th Century. 

First, Chinese leaders attribute those global power differentials to Europe’s first-mover successes in technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution.  Those successes not only boosted wealth and economic productivity, but also gave rise to a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) in which the currency of military power was transformed through developments such as the armored steamship, long-range artillery, repeating firearms, railroad logistics, and the industrial-scale manufacture of equipment, munitions, and materiel.

Second, Chinese leaders see the West as having used all that Industrial Revolution power to build an entire world order around itself.  As the PRC’s State Council Information Office has phrased it, for instance, “[i]nternational politics and the economic system have been dominated by Western powers since the First Industrial Revolution.”  Indeed, Chinese strategic thinkers seem to see that kind of world-reordering power to be almost an inevitable result of first-mover advantage in such an Industrial Revolution.

Accentuating the point, Xi Jinping himself has suggested that the United States’ dominance in the post-1945 and post-Cold War world resulted from America’s ability to dominate two successive further Industrial Revolutions.  As Xi put it to an audience at the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg in 2018, 

“[t]he previous three industrial revolutions were all characterized by transformative advancement in science and technology: the rise of mechanization in the 18th century, the harnessing of electricity in the 19th century, and the advent of the Information Age in the 20th century.”

It certainly would have escaped the notice of no one in his audience that all three of those “revolutions” Xi described were ones that initially asymmetrically empowered Western countries.

The central reason why technology competition with the United States plays such a critical role in CCP strategy today arises directly from these conclusions. 

For one thing, the international order created by these first three Industrial Revolutions is one that China basically hates.  That international order is the one first crafted by imperialist European power in the 19^th Century in ways that subjected Beijing to what it describes as a “Century of Humiliation,” and it is an international order subsequently perpetuated under American dominance, especially in the post-1991 era.  And this order is – as Liang Qichao himself made clear more than a century ago in lamenting the growing power of Theodore Roosevelt’s U.S. Navy in the Pacific Ocean – quite incompatible with China playing the preeminent role it wants to play in the world.

If China is to turn things around so that they once more resemble more what Beijing envisions as the naturally Sinocentric order of things, what the CCP thinks is needed is therefore another Industrial Revolution – but this time one in which China secures first-mover advantage. 

And a new Industrial Revolution is precisely what Xi Jinping claims to see coming.  “Today,” he has said, “we are experiencing another revolution in science, technology and industry, which is greater in scope and depth.” 

CCP strategic planning documents such as its 14^th Five-Year Plan seek to seize a first-mover advantage for China in this revolution through state investments in the technologies the Party expects to bring this about.  This includes, to quote that Five-Year Plan, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Quantum information technology, integrated circuits, what the plan calls “[b]rain science and brain-inspired research,” genetics and biotechnology, clinical medicine and health, aerospace technology, and “deep space, deep earth, deep sea, and polar exploration.” 

To this end – in an effort to which I believe I may have been the first serving U.S. Government official to call official attention back in mid-2018 – the PRC has also been working to “fuse” its civilian and military industrial sectors under unitary overall CCP management, so that national power can benefit to the maximum extent possible from every single technological or scientific advance made by, or accessible to, anyone subject to PRC jurisdiction, anywhere.  Furthermore, China has been working to co-opt international technology standards bodies to promote its own firms’ standards as the global norm, and to use “Belt and Road Initiative” investments to lock countries in the developing world into positions of dependence upon Chinese technology.

It is, altogether, an extraordinarily ambitious and far-reaching effort.  The PRC clearly believes it can plan its way to success in seizing what its strategists refer to as the geopolitical “commanding heights” of first-mover advantage in a Fourth Industrial Revolution.  Moreover, Beijing expects to be able to employ for its own geopolitical benefit the new RMA that Chinese strategists believe will also result from these advances – what Xi Jinping has described as “a new global military revolution” that will transform China’s armed services “into world-class forces.”

In light of CCP strategists’ interpretation of history, in which the first three Industrial Revolutions basically allowed Western powers to force the entire rest of the world into de facto subjugation for the better part of two centuries, this PRC vision is breathtaking in its scope and ambition.  China wants, in effect, to seize for itself that kind of geopolitical advantage through a Fourth Industrial Revolution, and it has adopted the “whole of nation” technology-focused industrial policy it believes will make this possible.

III.           Our Challenge

So from the perspective of the non-Chinese world, that’s clearly a pretty big deal. 

But will it work?  Honestly, I don’t know. 

The optimist in me remembers that the first three Industrial Revolutions weren’t ever really planned as such.  Government policies in the countries involved may perhaps have played some facilitating role, but I don’t think anyone has ever actually deliberately planned their country’s way to and through such changes before. 

Nor am I sure that it’s actually possible to do so.  It may well be that by their nature, the transformative effects of disruptive technological innovation cannot really be foreseen, much less actually orchestrated by government bureaucrats or any other central authority.  So perhaps the CCP has attempted “mission impossible” with its industrial strategy.

On the other hand, I don’t know that it’s impossible to plan an Industrial Revolution, or to use policy levers to help accelerate and steer one that happens to be underway for other reasons.  Britain may not have intended to be the first “Industrial Revolutionary,” after all, but it remains the case that post-1870 Germany and post-Meiji-Restoration Japan didn’t do such a bad job of boosting their own economic and military power through industrial policy, nor were Joseph Stalin’s brutal efforts in this regard entirely wasted in the Soviet Union.  And of course the PRC itself has certainly made a lot of progress over the last generation – albeit with lots of American and other Western help – in very self-consciously building up what CCP strategists refer to as its “comprehensive national power” (CNP).

So I’d say the jury is still out.  Which makes it all the more important that we figure out effective responses to the technology competition – and hence geopolitical – challenge we face from the PRC.

Now, make no mistake, I certainly don’t think that the right answer to this technology “China challenge” is to mirror-image Beijing’s approach to seizing the “commanding heights” of the next Industrial Revolution.  As members of a free society founded upon ideals of individual rights, we do not want our leaders to have access to the kind of authoritarian coercive tools that Xi Jinping routinely uses within China to ensure that his subjects follow Party guidance in supporting industrial policy objectives.  And our system of government quite properly precludes our leaders having such authoritarian powers anyway.

So we need an answer to the challenge of wide cross-sectoral coordination and promoting technological innovation and development that is appropriate to our own political and economic system.  And I don’t think there’s an easy answer.

It’s true that Western governments have sometimes tried to boost science and technology in the past.  Even in the generally free-market United States, we saw a boom in government-directed investment in basic science in the early years of the Cold War, and a pretty successful targeted industrial policy effort undertaken for national security reasons – and to win the “Space Race” – after the shock of Soviet advancements symbolized by the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. 

Yet we still have no precedents for or experience with the kind of full-spectrum approach represented by PRC industrial strategy.

As I described in a paper published last year by the MITRE Corporation’s Center for Strategic Competition, a number of Western governments explored the creation of “super-ministries” that were intended to spur coordination across traditional government “stovepipes” to help address challenges in the 1970s such as the Energy Crisis, stalled economic growth in the era of “stagflation,” and the (then) newfound awareness of environmental pollution.   The U.S. Department of Energy, in fact, was one of those efforts, created in 1977 to consolidate some 30 different functions that had previously been carried out by separate government entities.

Such efforts went out of fashion during the 1980s, but in the 1990s enthusiasm returned for cross-cutting organizational forms – which, it was hoped, could help with problems such as terrorism, poverty, and sustainable development.  Perhaps most famously, the Labour government of then British Prime Minister Tony Blair advocated a concept it called “joined-up government.” 

Those efforts, too, went out of fashion after a while, but we Americans shouldn’t forget that after the shock of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, we created another new “superministry,” the Department of Homeland Security, in hopes of pulling together and coordinating efforts by 22 previously separate agencies to protect our homeland against terrorist and other security threats.

Notwithstanding the Biden Administration’s current interest in centrally-coordinated approaches to things such as combating climate change, however, the track record of government-managed cross-sectoral coordination is mixed. 

There has been bipartisan support in recent years for at least some degree of government intervention to promote innovation and help restore U.S. competitive position in some areas.  Perhaps most notably, we now have the CHIPS and Science Act of 2021, which aimed to provide federal money to catalyze American investment in semiconductor manufacturing in the face of PRC competition.  But it remains the case that we are neither capable of nor willing to allow ourselves to become involved in truly full-spectrum industrial policy à la Chinoise, as it were.

But that’s probably OK.  For my part, I do believe the government can do helpful things in creating an environment for innovation – such as in using federal money to “prime the pump” and catalyze private sector investment and innovation in critical areas, in setting technology standards and maintaining a transportation and communications infrastructure conducive to innovation, and in supporting relevant workforce education and training.  But I think our strength lies more in public-private collaborations, pursuant to an overall shared vision of national necessity and success, than it does in actual governmental industrial “winner-picking.” 

As I see it, an American approach to technology competition must involve a good deal of what I have called the “lower-level politics” of eliciting voluntary cooperative effort from diverse cross-sectoral stakeholders by “building a strong and unified sense of values, trust, values-based management, and collaboration” in order to “reestablish a ‘common ethic’ and a ‘cohesive culture’ in the public sector .... All agencies should be bound together by a single, distinctive ethos of public service.” 

IV.          We Are Not Alone

We also need to remember that we’re not in this alone.  To the contrary, we should have many partners in this effort.  Far beyond the ambit merely of “whole of nation” American collaboration, a voluntarist cooperation between likeminded friends on the international stage – with a shared vision of need and a shared vision of victory – is critical to success.

We’ve already seen hopeful examples emerge of the kind of thing we need a lot more of, such as with the “Quad” partnership between the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, and with the “AUKUS” trilateral security partnershipin military-related technology development between the United States, Great Britain, and Australia.  This kind of thinking is very promising.

And we don’t actually need AUKUS-style deep and militarily-focused relationships with everyone.  Military alliances are tremendous, and we should prize and deepen those we have.  Yet not all countries in areas such as the Indo-Pacific wantthat kind of a relationship with us, nor want to take that kind of implied “alliance-ish” position “against” China.  But that’s OK too.  Our partnership effort in meeting today’s technology challenge can be a “big tent,” with various stakeholders participating in various ways.

Because China’s vision of victory – at least as I see it, anyway – is a new global order that operates on fundamentally Sinocentric principles, it is not necessary that our theory of competitive success be a totalizing one of some sort of U.S. dominance.   That’s much too simplistic an idea of “winning.”  Instead, we need merely to ensure the creation and maintenance of a network of pervasively cross-cutting and pluralistic economic, military, technological, diplomatic, and socio-cultural relationships that simply don’t run through or depend upon China.   

As I’ve written elsewhere using “latticework” terminology that seems to have been adopted by the Biden Administration, we need to build and maintain a robust environment of Sino-independent relationships.  We don’t need everyone to flock to our banner, just that they reject Beijing’s neo-imperialist pressures to marshal under that of the CCP.  Simply preserving all other nations’ freedom and autonomy in a pluralist world is victory enough against a totalitarian autocracy bent on “national rejuvenation” at everyone else’s expense.

In terms of technology strategy, as I argued last year in the National Security Law Journal, this means at least two things.  First, we must be even tougher in restricting sensitive transfers to those who wish us ill – augmenting our strategic prudence in ways reflecting the importance of not helping potential adversaries become more powerful.  And we must be more restrictive in this fashion in collaboration with our friends, building what I call “coalitions of caution.”

But second, while being more restrictive vis-à-vis our competitors, we also need to be willing to be more permissive in sharing with our friends and partners in this great competition.  This doesn’t always come easily to us.  In the intelligence arena, for instance, so-called “NOFORN” restrictions make it unnecessarily difficult to share information even with our closest military allies.  I’m also told that the Biden Administration’s State Department has been dragging its feet in adjusting our International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) rules to permit more effective technology collaboration even with our AUKUS security partners. 

These bureaucratic reflexes might be understandable in an organizational culture that crystallized in the halcyon years of post-Cold War unipolarity and American “hyperpower” dominance.  But today is not that era, and we have great need of friends and effective partners.  So if we need to get a bit outside our traditional “comfort zone” in sharing technology with them in pursuit of greater collective capabilities through collaboration, so be it.

V.            Conclusion

So that’s my vision for the challenge we face, and – at least in very general terms – the general type of response we need to meet it.

When I was last in government, having played a role in helping U.S. competitive strategy vis-à-vis China evolve from an early fixation upon tariff wars into a more specific and defined emphasis upon technology competition, one of my great fears was that the next presidential administration would abandon all we had done and return to the “business as usual” of the naïvely uncritical engagement with China that U.S. leaders pursued for decades.

That hasn’t happened, however.  Moreover, though it sometimes seems uneasy with itself for having taken strong steps against dangerous Chinese self-aggrandizement and might yet make concessions in hope of warmer ties, the Biden Administration has continued our robust approach to technology controls, even moving things forward in some respects.  And this I applaud – both because it is the right policy, and also because such a cross-partisan commitment to key goals is otherwise rare in modern Washington.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared last year that it is now no longer U.S. policy merely “to stay only a couple of generations ahead” of China in “certain key technologies.”  In instead, he made clear, it is now U.S. policy “to maintain as large of a lead as possible,” and to this end to employ “technology export controls” as a “strategic asset.” 

Now, I won’t go so far as to say that I couldn’t have said it better myself, because I actually did make similar arguments in November 2020 when sitting the chair of the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. In one of the Arms Control and International Security papers we published during my time in that role, for example, I emphasized the need “[t]o prevent (or delay) the emergence of technological asymmetries that could imperil strategic stability” by adopting “significantly more prudent, cautious, and restrictive approaches to technology control and/or denial vis-a-vis great power competitors” coupled with “taking successful steps to stimulate innovation and unleash more creative dynamism in the Free World’s own technology sectors.”

But I am certainly very pleased that the Biden Administration seems to agree.  And I’m pleased that, with such aims in mind, it has approached technology competition with China quite seriously. 

Frankly, I’m delighted to see that – as I had hoped when in office – bipartisan competitive strategy is now the “new normal” in Washington.  That’s bad news for the Chinese Communist Party, but good news for free peoples everywhere.

And so perhaps I’ll just leave you technologists and innovators with that note of optimism – but also with the admonition that there’s a lot more to technology competition than just technology controls. 

As I used to emphasize frequently when at the State Department, you don’t win a technology race just by slowing the other guy’s rate of progress.  You win by running faster than he does, and by keeping it up. 

Technology restrictions can buy time in which to implement other policies, and that’s excellent.  But the main objective is to be more technologically innovative ourselves.  We need to be more successful in moving new ideas from basic insight through proof-of-concept and engineering, into prototyping, into deployed applications, and then scaling fielded innovations to need.  We need to do better at attracting and producing a creative and skilled workforce capable of doing all this.  And we need to ensure the maintenance of a legal-regulatory, institutional, and policy environment conducive to effective technology uptake and the development of new use cases.

That “running faster” is the real secret to success, and the best technology controls in the world do no more than provide mere breathing space in which to get that recipe right.  And that’s where folks like you guys come in – in “doing the doing” of actually winning in technology competition by developing and fielding technologies that empower, enrich, and strengthen our country, economy, and our society, as well as those of our friends and partners and other free peoples around the world. 

If we can do that, we will ensure that whatever geopolitical windfall there is from the next Industrial Revolution – if indeed there is one – is not monopolized by paranoid Communist autocrats seeking to remain in power atop a repressive regime and to build their country’s power and influence at the expense of the freedom and autonomy of sovereign peoples everywhere.

So Godspeed, folks!  Thanks for listening.

-- Christopher Ford