Tag Archive for: great powers

China faces major challenges in achieving goal of global technological pre-eminence

China has overtaken the United States to top the world in the number of high-quality scientific papers it is producing.

Analysis by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy indicates a marked improvement in the quality of China’s scientific and technological development over the past two decades.

The institute’s Japanese science and technology indicators 2022 report says that in 1998–2000, China ranked 13th in the world in the index of adjusted top 10% scientific papers it produced. Twenty years later, China has topped the ranking for 2018–2020.

China’s National medium- and long-term program for science and technology development (2006–2020) aimed to raise the number of internationally cited scientific papers by Chinese researchers to within the top five in the world by 2020. Now China has become the most influential science and technology nation in terms of generating the most prominent papers, far exceeding its target. As this process built momentum, President Xi Jinping’s administration began to proclaim China a ‘science and technology major power’ (科技大国).

The Chinese government has not yet adopted its targeted status of a ‘science and technology great power’ (科技强国). Xi has called on scientists to help make that happen within the larger story of achieving his mooted ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ by mid-century, when the People’s Republic marks its 100th anniversary.

Chinese researchers say comprehensive indicators defining a country as a science and technology great power include expenditure on research and development as a percentage of GDP, the proportion of researchers in the working population, the number of internationally influential papers produced, the proportion of international applications in the Patent Cooperation Treaty system, the balance of intellectual property royalties in international trade, and the number of Nobel Prizes and other awards.

Indicators of the conditions for a science and technology great power

Japan Germany United States China China’s objectives
2017 2035 2050
Expenditure on research and development as a percentage of GDP (%) 3.1 2.9 2.7 2.1 3.5 4
Researchers per 100 citizens (%) 0.996* 0.919* 0.914** 0.218* 0.4 0.5
Internationally influential papers published (%) 3.32* 5.81* 25.53* 14.01* 20 25
Volume of patent applications as a percentage of GDP (US$ billion) 8.9 4.6 2.9 2.1 4 8
Intellectual property revenues as a percentage of trade (%) 2.1 1.2 5.0 0.1 X Y
Number of Nobel Prizes awarded in three natural sciences (cumulative totals) 14 61 172 2 ≥10 ≥20

* Data for 2016; ** data for 2015.
Source: Table compiled by the author based on the table in Zhang Zhiqiang, Tian Qianfei and Chen Yunwei 2018, ‘Research on main scientific and technological indicators of science and technology power’, Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 33(10): 1060.

In 2021, Xi’s administration set the goal of making China a science and technology great power in its 14th five-year plan and goals until 2035.

Seven goals for strategic science programs were next-generation artificial intelligence; quantum information; integrated circuits; brain science and brain-mimetic artificial intelligence research; genes and biotechnology; clinical medicine and health; and deep space, deep earth, deep sea and polar exploration. The 20th congress of the Chinese Communist Party, starting on Sunday, will also uphold the goal of making China a science and technology great power.

The CCP leadership has acknowledged that this will not be easy. At a conference of Chinese top scientists in April last year, Xi said the world was undergoing a once-in-a-century transformation, the international environment was challenging, the world economy was entering a period of stagnation, global supply chains were being restructured, and instability and uncertainty were increasing. He added: ‘Technological innovation has become the main battleground of international strategic competition, and the race for science and technology strategic high ground is more intense than ever. We must have a strong sense of urgency and make our efforts sufficient.’

The administration’s sense of crisis stems from factors including the increasing technological clampdown on China by developed countries. In the past, China’s science and technology capabilities were enhanced mainly through the introduction of technology in exchanges with advanced countries. However, Western countries believe much of this technology has been obtained illicitly using methods that slip through conventional trade and investment regulations. They are concerned that this is strengthening China’s military power and its ability to challenge the liberal international order. The US government has radically strengthened its trade and investment restrictions on China and other democratic countries have made similar moves.

Rising military tensions with the US have also spurred a sense of crisis in Xi’s administration. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan became widely discussed in Western countries.

To realise a ‘world-class military’ on a par with that of the US by the middle of the century, Xi’s administration is accelerating the transfer of cutting-edge technology to the military sector to transform equipment, weapons, organisational culture and capabilities, and generate a ‘new military revolution’. Senior People’s Liberation Army officials recognise that harnessing emerging technologies is key to reversing the military inferiority of the PLA vis-à-vis the US military. However, achieving this through the use of science and technology is becoming tougher in the environment of tighter trade and investment restrictions by Western countries.

Xi’s government has repeatedly used the term ‘self-reliance and self-strengthening’ (自立自) in the context of China becoming a science and technology great power. This means developing core technologies that are key in global value chains through a ‘whole nation system’ (举国体制).

Around 2015, the government began using the slogan ‘Made in China 2025’ to increase technological self-sufficiency and it adopted the ‘military–civil fusion’ development strategy to promote the military use of advanced technology developed in the civil sector. However, this does not appear to be progressing as it hoped. For example, China aimed to be 70% self-sufficient in semiconductor manufacturing by 2025, but an estimate puts current domestic production at less than 20%.

China will continue its efforts to improve its science and technology capabilities and this will have an impact on its international relations. While upgrading its industrial structures, China has strengthened regulations governing technology exports to protect its national security interests. Xi has said he wants to increase China’s role in global supply chains and to strengthen its economy against deliberate supply chain interruptions. In the past, China has applied pressure on other countries by tightening import and export controls on mineral resources, agricultural products and cultural projects. Technology exports and investment are likely to be added to this list. That could increase China’s influence over developing countries keen for its technology and investment.

China’s attempt to become fully self-sufficient in core technologies will create its own dilemma. To develop its science and technology capabilities, China needs to exchange technology and personnel with advanced countries. Such countries will likely not welcome this exchange as long as Xi’s administration continues to pursue its military–civil fusion strategy.

Concerned Western countries have already restricted the access of researchers suspected of having ties with the PLA and suspended joint research projects.

The more the Chinese leadership promotes self-sufficiency, the harder it will be to maintain an open-door policy—and to realise its dream of becoming a science and technology great power.

After the liberal international order

Many analysts argue that the liberal international order ended with the rise of China and the election of US President Donald Trump. But if Democratic challenger Joe Biden defeats Trump in November’s election, should he try to revive it? Probably not, but he must replace it.

Critics correctly point out that the American order after 1945 was neither global nor always very liberal. It left out more than half the world in the Soviet bloc and China and included many authoritarian states. American hegemony was always exaggerated. Nonetheless, the most powerful country must lead in creating global public goods, or they will not be provided—and Americans will suffer.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a case in point. A realistic goal for a Biden administration should be to establish rules-based international institutions with different membership for different issues.

Would China and Russia agree to participate? During the 1990s and 2000s, neither could balance American power, and the United States overrode sovereignty in pursuit of liberal values. The US bombed Serbia and invaded Iraq without approval by the United Nations Security Council. It also supported a UN General Assembly resolution in 2005 that established a ‘responsibility to protect’ citizens brutalised by their own governments—a doctrine it then used in 2011 to justify bombing Libya to protect the citizens of Benghazi.

Critics describe this record as post-Cold War American hubris—Russia and China felt deceived, for example, when the NATO-led intervention in Libya resulted in regime change—whereas defenders portray it as the natural evolution of international humanitarian law. In any case, the growth of Chinese and Russian power has set stricter limits to liberal interventionism.

What’s left? Russia and China stress the norm of sovereignty in the UN Charter, according to which states can go to war only for self-defence or with Security Council approval. Taking a neighbour’s territory by force has been rare since 1945 and has led to costly sanctions when it has happened (as with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014). In addition, the Security Council has often authorised the deployment of peacekeeping forces in troubled countries, and political cooperation has limited the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. This dimension of a rules-based order remains crucial.

As for economic relations, the rules will require revision. Well before the pandemic, China’s hybrid state capitalism underpinned an unfair mercantilist model that distorted the functioning of the World Trade Organization. The result will be a decoupling of global supply chains, particularly where national security is at stake.

Although China complains when the US prevents companies like Huawei from building 5G telecommunications networks, this position is consistent with sovereignty. After all, China prevents Google, Facebook, and Twitter from operating in China for security reasons. Negotiating new trade rules can help prevent the decoupling from escalating. At the same time, cooperation in the crucial financial domain remains strong, despite the current crisis.

By contrast, ecological interdependence poses an insurmountable obstacle to sovereignty, because the threats are transnational. Regardless of setbacks for economic globalisation, environmental globalisation will continue, because it obeys the laws of biology and physics, not the logic of contemporary geopolitics. Such issues threaten everyone, but no country can manage them alone. On issues like Covid-19 and climate change, power has a positive-sum dimension.

In this context, it is not enough to think of exercising power over others. We must also think in terms of exercising power with others. The Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization help us as well as others. Since Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong met in 1972, China and the US have cooperated despite ideological differences. The difficult question for Biden will be whether the US and China can cooperate in producing global public goods while competing in the traditional areas of great-power rivalry.

Cyberspace is an important new issue—partly transnational, but also subject to sovereign government controls. The internet is already partly fragmented. Norms regarding free speech and privacy on the internet can be developed among an inner circle of democracies but will not be observed by authoritarian states.

As suggested by the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, some rules barring tampering with the internet’s basic structure are also in authoritarians’ interests if they want connectivity. But when they use proxies for information warfare or to interfere in elections (which violates sovereignty), norms will have to be reinforced by rules such as those the US and the Soviet Union negotiated during the Cold War (despite ideological hostility) to limit the escalation of incidents at sea. The US and like-minded states will have to announce the norms they intend to uphold, and deterrence will be necessary.

Insistence on liberal values in cyberspace would not mean unilateral US disarmament. Rather, the US should distinguish between the permitted soft power of open persuasion and the hard power of covert information warfare, to which it would retaliate. Overt programs and broadcasts by Russia and China would be allowed, covert coordinated behaviour such as manipulation of social media would not. And the US would continue to criticise these countries’ human rights records.

Polls show that the US public wants to avoid military interventions, but not to withdraw from alliances or multilateral cooperation. And the public still cares about values.

If Biden is elected, the question he will face is not whether to restore the liberal international order. It is whether the US can work with an inner core of allies to promote democracy and human rights while cooperating with a broader set of states to manage the rules-based international institutions needed to face transnational threats such as climate change, pandemics, cyberattacks, terrorism and economic instability.

Strengthening the nuclear order

In the lead-up to each federal election, ASPI releases its Agenda for change: Strategic choices for the next government to help shape election platforms and public debate. This year the report contains 30 short essays by leading thinkers covering key strategic, defence and security challenges, and offers short- and long-term policy recommendations as well as outside-the-box ideas that break the traditional rules.

Agenda for change 2019 will be published tomorrow. The Strategist is posting a selection of essays from it on a range of topics.

Nuclear weapons are once more a focus for public and political debate. Great-power competition has returned, leading to more fractious strategic relationships among the P5—the recognised nuclear weapon states—and the competitive modernisation of nuclear arsenals. With the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in trouble, and growing uncertainty about whether the US and Russia can agree to extend the New START Treaty beyond its 2021 expiry date, great-power nuclear arms control is looking worryingly untethered. Some commentators are even suggesting that we might be moving into a post-arms-control era.

Nuclear deterrence—a doctrine intended to substitute threats of nuclear use for actual nuclear use—is under pressure from a range of sources. Those include the complexities of a more multipolar world, North Korea’s sudden elevation to the ranks of the world’s prospective ICBM powers, gradual improvements in ballistic missile defences, and the attempt to delegitimise both nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence by advocates of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the Nuclear Ban Treaty). Meanwhile, reports that Russia is increasingly interested in ‘escalate to de-escalate’ strategies suggest a wavering of the current norm against early nuclear use.

Technological developments are adding to the difficulties. New kinds of potential delivery vehicles are emerging, including hypersonic vehicles, air-launched ballistic missiles and long-range underwater drones. Improvements in the accuracy of long-range conventional strike capabilities and growing interest in low-yield nuclear warheads may be blurring the threshold between conventional and nuclear war. Developments in the cybersphere and space are bringing further layers of intrigue to balancing and war-fighting.

The challenge

The current nuclear order, at least as we’ve come to understand it since 1945, is fraying. That might not matter if a post-nuclear world were close, but the world’s in no shape to make the sudden leap towards nuclear abolition. The political will even to attempt such a leap is, understandably, in short supply among those who believe that nuclear deterrence continues to contribute in important ways to both global stability and national security. Full nuclear disarmament—spectacularly difficult when cheating even in small numbers could be strategically significant—lies decades away. And, in the meantime, nuclear weapons are too important for us to rely on muddling through.

The task before us is simple; it’s just not easy. We need to find new ways to strengthen the nuclear order for the years ahead. So far, our understanding of nuclear order has been based primarily upon William Walker’s synopsis of that order. He described it as two interlinked systems: a managed system of deterrence and a managed system of abstinence. The first allows a carefully controlled form of power-balancing between the central nuclear players in the interests of global stability; the second enshrines a broader pattern of abstinence across the international community.

It was an order defined during the Cold War principally by the controlled power-balancing of the two superpowers, gradual solidification of international support for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the breadth and credibility of the umbrella that the US extended to its allies. The superpowers were, broadly speaking, separated by intercontinental distance, tolerant of existing anomalies in their different spheres of influence, and sufficiently well endowed with the resources necessary to address the command-and-control challenges of a large and complex nuclear arsenal. Perhaps most importantly of all, both knew well the terrible costs of great-power war.

But much has changed. Russia’s now a smaller, revanchist power—embittered by its own fall from grace and more reliant on its nuclear weapons to maintain a claim to great-power status. The US has soured on its own liberal international ordering project, and that sourness is felt across the spectrum of its international engagement. Asia has become a more important driver in global politics, but brings to the global table little experience of formal arms control. True, it does have its own version of nuclear order based upon a principle of voluntary self-restraint. Unfortunately, that principle seems ill-suited to the task of reforging a stronger global order, and may prove inadequate even in relation to Asia’s future regional nuclear order.

The NPT is also encountering headwinds. The treaty certainly reinforced the commitment to nuclear abstinence by the bulk of the world’s non-nuclear states, but it also included an obligation on the existing nuclear weapon states to disarm, making nuclear deterrence merely a way station on the path to a nuclear-free world. How long nuclear deterrence might legitimately last isn’t settled by the NPT. The modernisation of existing arsenals certainly wasn’t prohibited under the treaty. And, given the prominence of deterrence as a foundation stone of nuclear order in its own right, discarding it prematurely might do more harm than good. That’s also true of extended nuclear deterrence—the doctrine under which the US offers the protection of its arsenal to its allies.

Quick wins

Unfortunately, few low-hanging fruit are available in strengthening the nuclear order. Signing and ratifying the Nuclear Ban Treaty isn’t an attractive option. It would mean voluntarily and unilaterally forsaking the protection of nuclear weapons without gaining anything in return. It would devalue the concept of power-balancing as an order-enhancer—and do so at the precise time when Western alliances are most in need of strategic modernisation. It would play merry havoc with the ANZUS alliance and the joint facilities. It would sour Australia’s relations with a range of other countries—including Japan and India—that think nuclear weapons are critical to their own security. And it would weaken Australian security at a time when regional power balances are shifting profoundly.

Unlike the ban treaty, the old US–Russian arms control agreements have the runs on the board in producing weapons reductions. So, at the abstract level, there might be a case for promoting one further round of US–Russian nuclear reductions (for example, perhaps to lower strategic nuclear warheads to 1,000 from the current level of 1,550). In practice, though, relations between Washington and Moscow are currently so chilly as to suggest that they’ll be struggling even to agree on an extension of the current New START Treaty before it expires in 2021.

Similarly, with Kim Jong-un’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing, it’s probably timely to push for final signature and ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by the eight outstanding Annex 2 countries (those 44 ‘nuclear-capable’ states that have to sign and ratify before the treaty enters into force). Three of the eight—North Korea, India and Pakistan—haven’t yet signed; the other five (China, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the US) have signed but not ratified. If North Korea were to sign, pressure would grow on the South Asian countries to do the same.

The hard yards

Still, strengthening the nuclear order requires much more than US and Russian recommitment to existing arms control agreements. Even if there’s such goodwill, the world needs to encourage better engagement in the nuclear ordering project by the other nuclear players. And, with Asia’s rise, we should be expecting Asian nuclear weapon states to start bringing more to the table—if not more substantive warhead reductions, then certainly more agreements to enhance overall nuclear stability and improve crisis management.

The immediate need, of course, concerns North Korea. We don’t know exactly how close North Korea is to having a fully capable thermonuclear-tipped ICBM. We do know that it’s closer than we’d like it to be, which is why Kim’s moratorium on nuclear testing and ICBM launches is important. Nuclear weapons are—because of their destructive power—great equalisers. The world has watched ‘the bomb’ slowly spread from superpowers to great powers, and subsequently to regional rivals. But the existence of nuclear-tipped ICBMs in the hands of a regime with little equity in the current global order would be deeply unsettling.

A full-court press is probably going to be needed to roll back North Korea’s nuclear program. So it’s an important early test of what the emerging Asian great powers—such as China and India—might bring to the table.

Breaking the rules

Australia’s long been an important advocate of a range of nuclear ordering agreements, but we shouldn’t take for granted that a stronger order is the inevitable product of today’s nuclear uncertainties. A new period of nuclear disorder might lie in front of us. Not only might nuclear arms control founder at the bilateral level between the US and Russia, the NPT itself—the treaty underpinning the managed system of abstinence—might collapse. As the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review observed, we live in a world of geopolitical and technological uncertainty. One of those geopolitical uncertainties involves the possibility of a ‘proliferation cascade’—a period of rapid, successive, nuclear proliferation by states already well equipped to head down that path.

Australia, like the bulk of the world’s states, last chose its nuclear ‘identity’ in the early 1970s, when we signed and ratified the NPT and put aside our own underdeveloped indigenous weapons program. Compared to some other countries, Australia isn’t a repentant state. Still, when we ratified the NPT only the P5 countries had nuclear weapons. That number is now nine. Would Australian nuclear identity flip in a world that included almost double that number of nuclear weapon states? Not automatically, no. Sheer numbers aren’t a sufficiently compelling strategic driver. But some current status quo powers might proliferate—as a result of the perceived weakening, or overt withdrawal, of US extended nuclear deterrence, coupled with a simultaneous sense of escalated threat from an authoritarian, nuclear-armed, regional hegemonic power.

Those factors might well incite a deeply divisive debate in Australia about whether—and how—the country might appropriately respond to a sharp deterioration in our strategic environment. In our back pocket, we probably need a plan for strategic survival in a more competitive and disordered nuclear world.