{"id":43729,"date":"2013-06-20T15:37:54","date_gmt":"2013-06-20T14:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-chinas-plans-to-be-a-superpower-could-set-it-up-for-collapse\/43729\/"},"modified":"2013-06-20T16:02:26","modified_gmt":"2013-06-20T15:02:26","slug":"why-chinas-plans-to-be-a-superpower-could-set-it-up-for-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/why-chinas-plans-to-be-a-superpower-could-set-it-up-for-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"Why China’s Plans to Be a Superpower Could Set It up for Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from <\/i>TomDispatch.com\u00a0here<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Sun Tzu, the ancient author of\u00a0The Art of War, must be throwing a rice wine party in his heavenly tomb in the wake of the shirtsleeves California love-in between President Obama and President Xi Jinping. “Know your enemy” was, it seems, the theme of the meeting. Beijing was very much aware of — and had furiously protested — Washington\u2019s deep plunge into China\u2019s computer networks over the past 15 years via a secretive NSA<\/a>\u00a0unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (with the apt acronym TAO). Yet Xi merrily allowed Obama to pontificate on hacking and cyber-theft as if China were alone on such a stage.<\/p>\n

Enter — with perfect timing — Edward Snowden, the spy<\/a>\u00a0who came in from Hawaii and who has been holed up in Hong Kong since May 20th. And cut to the wickedly straight-faced, no-commentary-needed take<\/a>\u00a0on Obama\u2019s hacker army by Xinhua, the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s official press service. With America\u2019s dark-side-of-the-moon surveillance programs like Prism suddenly in the global spotlight, the Chinese, long blistered by Washington\u2019s charges about hacking American corporate and military websites, were polite enough. They didn\u2019t even bother to mention that Prism was just another node<\/a>\u00a0in the Pentagon\u2019s Joint Vision 2020 dream of \u201cfull spectrum dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n

By revealing the existence of Prism (and other related surveillance programs), Snowden handed Beijing a roast duck banquet of a motive for sticking with cyber-surveillance. Especially after Snowden, a few days later, doubled down by unveiling what Xi, of course, already knew — that the National Security Agency had for years been relentlessly hacking<\/a>\u00a0both Hong Kong and mainland Chinese computer networks.<\/p>\n

But the ultimate shark fin\u2019s soup on China\u2019s recent banquet card was an editorial<\/a>\u00a0in the Communist Party-controlled\u00a0Global Times. \u201cSnowden,\u201d it acknowledged, \u201cis a \u2018card\u2019 that China never expected,\u201d adding that \u201cChina is neither adept at nor used to playing it.\u201d Its recommendation: use the recent leaks \u201cas evidence to negotiate with the U.S.\u201d It also offered a warning that \u201cpublic opinion will turn against China\u2019s central government and the Hong Kong SAR [Special Administrative Region] government if they choose to send [Snowden] back.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a set of cyber-campaigns — from cyber-enabled economic theft and espionage to the possibility of future state-sanctioned cyber-attacks — evolving in the shadows, it\u2019s hard to spin the sunny \u201cnew type of great power relationship\u201d President Xi suggested for the U.S. and China at the recent summit.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the (State) Economy, Stupid<\/strong><\/p>\n

The unfolding Snowden cyber-saga effectively drowned out the Obama administration\u2019s interest in learning more about Xi\u2019s immensely ambitious plans for reconfiguring<\/a>\u00a0the Chinese economy — and how to capture a piece of that future economic pie for American business. Essential to those plans is an astonishing investment of $6.4 trillion<\/a>\u00a0by China\u2019s leadership in a drive<\/a>\u00a0to \u201curbanize\u201d the economy yet further by 2020.<\/p>\n

That will be the dragon\u2019s share of a reconfigured development model emphasizing<\/a>\u00a0heightened productivity, moving the country up the international manufacturing quality ladder and digital pecking order, and encouraging ever more domestic consumption by an ever-expanding middle class. This will be joined to a massive ongoing investment in scientific and technological research. China has adopted the U.S. model of public-private sector academic integration with the aim of producing dual-use technologies and so boosting not only the military but also the civilian economy.<\/p>\n

Beijing may, in the end, spend up to 30% of its budget on defense-related research and development. This has certainly been a key vector in the country\u2019s recent breakneck expansion of information technology, microelectronics, telecommunications, nuclear energy, biotechnology, and the aerospace industry. Crucially, none of this has happened thanks to the good graces of the Goddess of the Market.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com\u00a0here. Sun Tzu, the ancient author of\u00a0The Art of War, must be throwing a rice wine party in his heavenly tomb in the wake of the shirtsleeves California love-in between President Obama and President Xi Jinping. “Know your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-43729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}