CCP Elite on Tech + Great-Power Competition
Party theory on the rise and fall of great powers
Intro by Dylan Levi King
Is there a grand unifying theory of international relations? And could we come up with a set of rules — taking in the events of the distant past and our present — that explains why nations rise and fall? If the Chinese leadership dreams of China becoming a great nation again — as the term “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation” 中华民族伟大复兴 implies it once was — those rules might come in handy.
That is precisely what the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations 中国现代国际关系研究院 (CICIR) set out to accomplish. National Security and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers 大国兴衰与国家, a 2021 CICIR publication, is a sweeping albeit abstract look at what causes nations to rise and fall — not merely taking into account recent events, but looking back hundreds of years.
CICIR is not just an academic polyp but an affiliate of the National Security Commission of the Chinese Communist Party 中央国家安全委员会 (CNSC), and, more directly, its child agency, the Ministry of State Security 国家安全部 (MSS) — an arm of the state that has powers far greater than even a theoretical conglomeration of the CIA, FBI, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research would have. The CICIR is talking to the leadership, or at least the people who advise the leadership.
Earlier this year, I worked with Tanner Greer and Nancy Yu at the Center of Strategic Translation on hammering out a translation of “General Laws of the Rise of Great Powers,” one of the key chapters of the book. The book is attributed to nine individual CICIR analysts (the chapters have no bylines); it’s likely that “General Laws of the Rise of Great Powers” was the work of Zhang Yunchen 张运成 of CICIR’s World Economics Studies Institute.
Zhang outlines the following axioms:
International relations are defined by competitions between nations, which should be won by the nation which marshals superior resources, makes use of territorial advantages, and throws vast populations into conflicts.
But scientific, technological, commercial, and political advancement can level the playing field.
So, while a nation might occupy modest territory or have a comparatively small population, a technological advance brought to bear against a competitor could be decisive.
For example,
Sixteenth-century Portugal and the Netherlands, though lacking in abundant resources or large populations, became global powers through superior commercial and military prowess.
The same rule explains the failure of the Soviet Union, whose leadership squandered superior territory and population through mismanagement.
China, Zhang says, rose in the late twentieth century through territory and population — but it has continued on the road to becoming a great nation because it has seized scientific, technological, commercial, and political advances.
The CICIR is not writing simply to praise the Chinese model of technocracy. It’s also warning China’s leaders to avoid the traps that unseated previous claimants of great-nation status.
Below is an abridged version of the translation, which can be found in full here. Bolds were added by ChinaTalk.
Be sure to subscribe to the Center for Strategic Translation’s Substack for more excellent content like this.
General Laws of the Rise of Great Powers
The rise and decline of great powers, with each power replacing the next in its turn, is a common phenomenon in human history. … [T]hus far, there is no satisfactory solution to uphold as a standard. Nevertheless, history contains to some degree an internal causal logic, and there are shared characteristics in the path and the experience of nations that have risen in the past. For late-developing countries with the necessary fundamental conditions, the only way to seize the opportunity and realize such a rise is to absorb the experience of early-developing countries and formulate strategies appropriate to both their own conditions and those of their age.
Achieving the status of a great power most often depends on population [levels], territory [size], natural resources, geographical location, economic power, military strength, soft power, and other factors of this sort. … They are the material basis for determining whether a country has the potential to become a great power. But whether and to what extent that potential can be realized depends to a great extent on acquired strategies and favorable opportunities. A suitable national strategy can not only propel the rise of a great power and help it to avoid potential detours along the way, but it also has a bearing on whether a great power can hold on to its [great power] status. …
The more areas of superiority that a great power possesses, the greater its composite national strength will be, and the longer its age of prosperity will last. The outstanding advantages of Britain and the United States in the elements that confer superiority — such as scientific innovation and government efficiency, as well as their leadership, respectively, of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions — secured their status as unprecedented global superpowers. But American achievements were greater and their supremacy more outstanding. Apart from the benefits of latecomer’s advantage, [America’s success] is due to a historical heritage that provided population, territory, and natural resources, which allowed it to benefit from economies of scale. If a great power is deficient in certain aspects, however, [these deficiencies] can be compensated by [strength] in other aspects. For instance, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands had relatively small populations, but they relied on their overwhelming commercial and military superiority to become, at least for a time, dominant global powers.
Great power status also depends on the conditions of international competition. … In the final decade of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet Union, formerly a peer competitor of the United States, gave its rival the unprecedented status of sole global superpower. China during the Song dynasty was considered to be the most advanced civilization in the world … but it was, unfortunately, reaching that status at a time when nomadic peoples were becoming the preeminent powers. The four main rivals of the Song … had powerful cavalry forces that neutralized the wealth advantage of the agrarian great power, obstructing its potential rise as the overlord of a “global order under Chinese governance.”
…
As great powers rise, temporal, geographic, and demographic factors are all indispensable. Superior geography or demography, as well as other similar development factors, can sometimes be more important and have a more decisive influence than institutions and systems. There is no guarantee that these conditions will produce the rise of a great power; the lack of these fundamental conditions, however, necessarily precludes the possibility of the rise of a great power. When the level of science and technology [among competing powers] is similar, then geographic and demographic conditions become more important for ensuring the rise of a great power and for [that power’s ability to] persist over time.
There is Strength in Great Numbers
After Malthus proposed his “population theory,” international society has paid close attention to the potential negative impacts of population, believing that population growth can hinder the development of poor nations. In recent years, however, more and more attention is being paid to the positive impact of population growth on development. ... Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands relied on extensive colonies, as well as their advantages in other areas, such as commercial capital, maritime navigation, and military power, but they quickly declined due to an insufficient population in their core territory and a lack of territory. In the industrial age, the division of labor in society became increasingly complex, with more demands made on the labor force and the market, making it difficult for countries lacking in population and territory to rise as great powers.
…
Population and territorial superiority allowed China to become the only one of the four great ancient civilizations to have continued on to the present, and provided it with “a threshold for accommodation and an ability to absorb.” … [I]t was precisely China’s massive population and a deep-rooted traditional culture that provided great resistance to and delayed the beginning of the country’s early industrialization, which experienced numerous failed attempts and defeats. At the beginning of Reform and Opening 改革开放, population once again became a burden, and a certain amount of family-planning policy was required to free China from the “poverty trap.” After the country's economic takeoff, the massive “demographic dividend” was considered a major factor in the Chinese miracle. At present, the “demographic dividend” has expired, but educational level and per-capita income will provide an unprecedented “talent dividend” and “market dividend.” Once a population of 1.3 billion people has grown wealthy, the result will be a supersized marketplace.
India’s massive population and expansive territory gave its civilization an important position in the ancient world, but these [factors] also became a burden at the beginnings of industrialization. In early 2020, the Indian economy surpassed those of England and France, becoming the fifth-largest in the world. Goldman Sachs projects that India will have the third-largest economy in the world by 2040. As countries in Europe and East Asia face increasingly grave issues with aging and shrinking populations, India’s population numbers and [age] composition present massive advantages and potential. They can rely on “a continued abundance in their youth cohort.” [As] the American scholar [Fareed] Zakaria says, “If demography is destiny, then India is secure.”
Neighbors Are Dearer Than Distant Relatives
Considering the economic achievements of China after Reform and Opening, University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Edward Friedman said that one of the important factors was that China was “located in East Asia and not East Africa.” Here he is emphasizing the importance of the environment on China’s periphery to China’s rise. After Reform and Opening, China [joined] a trend of postwar development in East Asia. To a certain extent China’s economic achievements are due to the collective rise of the region — beginning with Japan’s modernization and the accomplishment of postwar industrialization, spreading to the Four Asian Tigers, and then turning into an industrialization wave that reached China's shores and gradually spread inland.
There is usually a fair deal of friction between neighboring countries, but at the level of civilizational and economic development, it is often the case that “neighbors are dearer than distant relatives.” Historically, the great majority of ancient and powerful states were concentrated on the Eurasian Continent, and they tended to rise and fall in sequence and as groups. After the Industrial Revolution, the main developed countries were found in Europe and North America. Looking at the rise and fall of many great powers, we see the cluster effect and peripheral diffusion effect quite strongly in economic development and civilizational progress. This is seen even more clearly in the collective rise of East Asia, or the arrival of what is called the “Asia-Pacific century.” The course of China’s Belt and Road Initiative provides further evidence [for this fact].
…
Over the previous five centuries, there have been three structural power shifts, as well as the successive rise of great powers and their [respective] regional communities. The first power shift came with the rise of Europe. The second power shift was the rise of America and its allies. Currently, the international community, following a “flying geese paradigm,” with the Asia-Pacific region at the head of a “V” formation, is undergoing a third modern power shift. As the Belt and Road Initiative gathers momentum, people expect to see the collective rise of the Belt and Road countries. In The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Peter Frankopan writes: “The world is spinning on its axis back to where it began a thousand years before on the Silk Road.”
Craft a High-Quality Friend Circle
Looking back over the last five centuries at the temporal and spatial sequence with which great powers rose, late-developing great powers were either neighbors of great powers that rose before them, or they were the “distant relatives” or friends — namely, states with which they had a close relationship based on shared cultural, political, or other relationship (for example, the relationship between a tributary state and the suzerain, or between states in an alliance). Social and political proximity has a major impact on trade and investment; similar cultural environments make it easier to pass knowledge and technology. … It was because of large differences between their culture and political systems that the [wildfire of] European industrialization “abruptly died” at “the asbestos edge of the Muslim sphere.”
Japan has submitted to Western civilization; apart from Japan's own “abandon Asia, learn from Europe” strategy, the great strategic importance attached to the country and the support extended to them by the United States had a major role in the rise of Japan. After the country was opened up by the United States, Japan became an American export market and shipping depot. After that, Japan became an increasingly important element of America’s international strategy. Following the Second World War, Japan started to receive support from America to counterbalance Eastern powers; economic aid, direct investment, and favored access to American markets were the most important external causes of Japan's rapid development.
During the period when Western powers took the dominant position in economics and science and technology, estrangement or even antagonism caused many countries to lose timely opportunities for development. Argentina’s missed opportunities to achieve economic success are considered to be related to its unwise diplomatic alliances. As Dambisa Moyo points out in Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth — and How to Fix It, “Among the biggest policy errors occurred when Argentina failed in 1944 to align itself with the United States, which was beginning its economic ascendancy. Instead, its leaders chose to align with Britain, just then commencing its economic decline.” After the Second World War, countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere joined the Soviet camp, pursuing Soviet-style industrialization, and thereby distancing themselves from the center of global markets and core technologies.
The State that Esteems Industry Will Increase In Wisdom Day by Day
Economic growth is a prerequisite to and a necessary foundation for the rise of a great power; this is one of the greatest challenges faced by great powers in maintaining their status. Paul Kennedy, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, emphasizes that the rise and fall of a great power comes down most decisively to relative economic power over other nations. In the era of agricultural economies, the great powers of the world were usually those with a high degree of agricultural development. After the Age of Discovery, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and other countries with limited populations and territories rose in succession, relying on commercial and military power that had no previous precedents. After the arrival of industrial society, timely realization of industrialization became a precondition for the rise of great powers. For a modern economy to be prosperous and strong it requires a powerful, diversified, and creative manufacturing industry.
Manufacturing can rejuvenate a nation. The manufacturing industry is the source of technological innovation and the force behind economic growth. In comparison to pre-industrial society, the Industrial Revolution produced astonishing increases in productivity. From the first year of the common era to 1400, the annual growth of the global economy was on average only 0.05%. In contrast, in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century, post-Industrial Revolution Britain, the United States during the nineteenth century, and the East Asian economies during the second half of the twentieth century had average respective growth rates of 0.5%, 2%, 4%, and 8 to 10%, respectively. Before the fifteenth century, it took 1,400 years for the global economy to double in size — but it took the East Asian economies only seven or eight years to pull off the same feat in the twentieth century.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Britain had already established the foundations for industrialization. … By 1870, Britain possessed a third of the world’s manufacturing output.
Owing to its unparalleled natural endowments and immigration and investment from Europe, the American economy was quite large from the founding. After the Civil War, the United States rapidly carried out the process of industrialization. In 1870, the United States accounted for less than a quarter of the world’s manufacturing capacity, but that rose to around 36% by the 1880s. In the century that followed, America held onto its hegemony over global manufacturing.
…
Becoming a major manufacturing power provides crucial security for the goal of realizing the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation. At the founding of New China, the country was fundamentally a grindingly poor and backward agricultural nation. China has now become the foremost industrial power in the world. The modern industrial system of China is the most comprehensive, encompassing forty-one major industrial categories, and producing over 200 of the top-500 industrial products in the world. In 2010, China surpassed the United States in manufacturing value-added, and by 2018, the Chinese manufacturing industry commanded 28% of global output. … At the gathering to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Reform and Opening, General Secretary Xi Jinping stated that becoming the foremost manufacturing power was necessary for “the Chinese people to take a decisive step on their journey towards wealth and strength.”
Conforming to the Laws of Industrialization
In the modern sense, economic development usually means a transition from agriculture to low-tech industry, then on to high-tech industries and service industries. Each country’s path to industrialization is not identical, but they conform to a similar law of industrial progress, usually developing industry in a sequence that begins with food, moves next to textiles, then machinery, chemicals, electronics, and so on, developing around these focal points in turn. As primary, secondary, and tertiary industries evolve successively to take the main position in social production, the dominant industry also upgrades gradually from labor-intensive to capital- and technology-intensive. In the industrialization of developed nations, light industry usually develops first, followed by heavy industry.
Many late-developing countries became impatient for results, rearranged this development sequence, and wandered off the path [of industrialized development].
…
For newly industrializing countries, however, following the law of industrial development — in which light industry follows heavy industry and there is progressive step-by-step development — has proven a crucial element of success. At the beginning of the 1980s, China also gave up on the strategy of prioritizing heavy industry, allowing light industry to develop rapidly. In the 1990s, the Chinese electronic information industry was one of the fastest-growing industrial sectors. From the end of the 1990s, China entered a stage of heavy industrialization, with heavy industry outstripping the expansion of light industry.
Integrating With the International Industrial Chain
One important prerequisite for the industrialization of late-developing countries is successfully taking on labor-intensive industries for international markets. Based on its natural resources, close cultural ties, and convenient maritime links with Europe, and especially its powerful economic momentum, the United States became in the second half of the nineteenth century the largest beneficiary of the overseas transfer of manufacturing from Britain. In 1914, the United States ranked first place globally in terms of the scale of capital input, with British bond investment accounting for 85.9% of foreign investment. After this international transfer of industry, America gradually became the new “factory of the world.”
…
… Through actively promoting the domestic market economy, actively calling for foreign investment, and taking advantage of a relatively good industrial foundation, China’s industrialization process experienced a remarkable acceleration; China became another “factory of the world.”
The aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis set off a new round of global industrial transfers. China became a major exporting country and also a recipient; excluding central and western regions in China, much of the industrial transfer was directed toward countries along the Belt and Road. There is hope that the Belt and Road countries might synchronize with Asia, which has high rates of economic and trade growth. Estimates hold that the average annual GDP growth rate of the Belt and Road countries will be significantly higher than the global average, opening up the hopeful possibility of a new global economic growth area.
…
Science and Technology Sustain the Rise of Nations
Economic development ultimately relies on obtaining and mastering advanced science and technology. Putting science and technology to use has become increasingly important since the Age of Discovery. As Adam Smith pointed out, the division of labor and the expansion of markets stimulate technological innovation; the wealth of nations is increased through greater labor productivity [produced by the division of labor and technology]. Robert Solow, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, holds the belief that, in the long-term, the only source of economic growth is industrial progress. Seven-eighths of the growth in the per capita GDP of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century can be attributed to technological progress.
…
At present, the major global science and technology centers are concentrated in the developed nations of Europe and North America, but trends show a shift toward the Asia-Pacific region. … Pan Jiaofeng 潘教峰, President of the Institutes of Science and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is among those who have pointed out that a new round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation is currently being fermented, which will provide China with the opportunity to become the center of global science and technology and the world leader in techno-scientific development.
Lead in High Technology Industries
Economically successful nations generally place a high degree of emphasis on scientific and technological innovation.
…
Drawing on the capital, expertise, and equipment of early-developing countries is the main way that late-developing countries can rapidly close the technology gap. …
For long periods of time, China was the global leader in science and technology, but it has missed out on the techno-scientific revolutions of the past 500 years. New China is an example of a country catching up from behind in science and technology, with the country making outstanding achievements in high-tech fields, with the Two Bombs, One Satellite 两弹一星 project as one example. In recent years, China has pulled off quantum leaps in numerous fields, including digital information technology, 5G, and artificial intelligence, accelerating its progress into the ranks of the global leaders in science and technology. Among patents approved globally in 2017, China claimed 30%, with the United States taking 23%, Japan 14%, South Korea 9%, and Europe 8%. Beginning in 2007, China began to award more doctorates in the natural sciences and engineering each year than the United States does.
China still has a not-insignificant gap to close with the United States in the fields of science and technology, but the [Chinese] growth rate is rapid, and there is potential for development. Between 2000 and 2017, China’s research and development expenditures grew at an average of 17.3%, easily beating the American rate of 4.3%. …
Rough Seas Reveal the Strength of the Mast
Since the 1980s, the ideas of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus have been widely disseminated, and developed countries demanded that developing nations adopt what are termed “good policies” and “good institutions” in the interests of economic development. But in actual practice, these sorts of policies and institutions [can only be] the result of industrialization. For late-developing countries in the process of rising as a great power, a stable government and good social order play a larger role in the process of industrialization than “Western-style democracy.” Many of those countries that blindly accepted the Washington Consensus did not merely fail to grow their economies but sank into political turmoil.
Strong and Effective Government
In Political Order in Changing Societies, Samuel Huntington points out that in third-world countries, the processes of modernization, economic development, and socio-cultural transformation take priority. Political modernization is possible only with their realization. Those countries that attempt to jump forward to a modern Western system in a short period of time ignore the reality that political modernization is a gradual process. They inevitably discover that attempting to accelerate the process paradoxically leads to delays. The transition from tradition to modernity requires a strong government, namely a government with the ability to balance political participation against political institutionalization. “In terms of observable behavior, the crucial distinction between a politically developed society and an underdeveloped one is the number, size, and effectiveness of its organizations.”
As well as promoting economic growth, stable governments are more likely to make long-term investments in things like public services and infrastructure. Zakaria points out that the stories of development in Japan, the United States, Europe, and China share a single thread, which is strong and reliable political institutions. “The Chinese government enjoys a high rate of popular support,” Zakaria writes, “which helps make it possible to carry out designated strategies.” …
An Open and Inclusive Strategy for Foreign Relations
Since at present globalization is still far from complete — and because national boundaries and geography remain boundaries to the flow of key elements [of the economy] — openness is crucial for the economic growth of late-developing countries. There is a positive correlation between economic growth and many indexes of openness to trade; there is a negative correlation between disruptions of free trade and economic growth; and countries open to trade tend to grow at twice the rate of countries that adopt a closed-door policy. …
…
Build a Strong Leadership Core
Leaders in the development of history can play important functions, directly affecting the trajectory and velocity of a rising great power. … Huntington believes that modernization requires authority with a transformative capacity, and authority must be concentrated in the hands of certain powerful individuals or groups.
After Portugal and Spain emerged from feudal division and became unified nation-states, there emerged strong central governments and monarchical powers. … After Spain became a unified nation-state, Queen Isabella planned ambitious maritime expeditions and even sold her jewels to fund Columbus’s expedition.
Britain built the most powerful navy in Europe with the support of Queen Elizabeth. King Louis XIV of France established absolute monarchical power, transforming the country from a disunited feudal aristocracy into a great and powerful nation. Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” of Germany, implemented social reforms, propelling Germany’s composite national strength to become the strongest in continental Europe. Peter the First, Tsar of Russia, initiated an epoch-making modernization movement for which he is remembered as the “greatest ruler” in Russian history. In the Meiji Restoration, Japan abrogated the authority of a hereditary aristocracy, reinforced central authority, and forced through political, economic, and social reforms. …
Historically, countries without a strong leadership core often fall into the “Bismarck trap.” After the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck, attempting to isolate and weaken France, advocated France adopt a multi-party republican system, believing that an unstable republican system would turn France into an unstable volcano. Between 1875 and 1940, France was ruled by 102 separate administrations, each lasting an average of five months, with two lasting a single day. The Soviet Union collapsed for a complex set of reasons, but one of the most important was the loss of authority by the ruling party.
… Establishing a strong leadership core for the Party was one of the great lessons of revolutionary victory. “Without Mao Zedong,” Deng Xiaoping proclaimed with great emotion, “the Chinese people would have been forced to grope in the dark for much longer.” … At a crucial moment for the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation, General Secretary Xi Jinping demonstrated a self-confident political will, and made farsighted strategic decisions, showing his willingness to take on the role of “the guiding spirit” and the “strong mast in rough seas.”
 |
|