Is the US a declining power? Elaborate, discuss implications, and illustrate.
A technology war between two economicsuperpowers is threatened to split theworld into two which country will be theleader of the next generation oftechnologies and reap all the economicbenefits from being that leader who willwin this nationalistic fight fortechnological supremacy and dominancewill countries across the globe beforced to take sidesChina’s telecommunications giant Huaweiis among a few technology companieswhich are caught between these twofeuding economic
powerhouses it has beenviewed as a national security threat bythe US security agencies and banned frombuying or acquiring American parts andtechnologiesI do think Huawei does pose a potentialsecurity threat that the US officialsare right to take seriouslywe know that Huawei has a very closerelationship with the Chinese governmentthis is an inescapable fact of Chinesecompanies they are required to have acommunist party president presence andthey are accountable to the Chinesegovernment but other analysts say theissue has been completely blown out ofproportion they believe that the u.s. is
targeting Huawei purely for commercial reasons while way is now the largesttelecom company in the world it has evenovertaken Apple as the world’s secondlargest smartphone provider
it has alsoemerged as the world leader of telecomequipment including 5g technologycommunications seen as the nextmilestone in the digital revolution therace to install 5g mobile networksreflects this growing rivalry betweenChinaand the us one that will determine political and economic fortunes ofnations for many decades to come youlook at the 5g development or the audiocommunication technologies or productsyou only see pretty much a few nameslike wow
Weis at te Ericsson Nokia andSamsung so there is no us come theinside Huawei works with a broad rangeof us suppliers for its productsincluding chip makers such as Intel andQualcomm as well as Google for itsAndroid operating system therestrictions imposed on farway mean thatit will lose access to critical productsand services from these companies forexample Google has now confirmed thatthe next flagship Huawei phone will nothave licensed Google Apps
theserestrictions would cost its consumerbusiness about 10 billion dollars in
revenue growth this is now forced theChinese tech giant to move towardsself-sufficiency by developing its ownin-house software or operating system toreplace Google’s Android the technologybreak up may now lay the foundation foran economic decoupling between the USand China splitting the world along alasting digital divide known as thedigital Iron Curtain in some areastowards already split so for example inthe technological a sphere the mainlandChinese they don’t use whatsapp they useWeChat and they use their own version ofTwitter as a treasure trove right maynot necessarily be bad because Ipersonally believe that it was bigenough before a lot of these thingsactually happened you may actually haveto carry two phones for a while to go todifferent country like what we areexperienced when we are using 3ds onmany counts China is not yet atechnology superpower
The EconomistIntelligence Unit for example doesn’teven rank China in its top 10 list ofcountry’s best suited for technologicalinnovation but China has already proventhat miracles are not impossible if youobstruct them from some of the keytechnologies right now it will justbasically spur them to actually spendmore on R&D and to innovate even faster piece and we all know anecdotally howhungry how keen the artists actuallydevelop their own core technologies sothey will just basically speed up theprocess you might be able to delay themfor a couple of years but you can’t stopthemat the end of the day and the u.s.remains particularly vulnerable in onearea of the tech war the supply of rareearths rare earth elements are used in awide range of consumer electronicsincluding iPhones electric car motorsmilitary jet engines satellites TVmonitors and lasers China todaydominates the world’s rare earth outputaccounting for over 70 percent of theworld’s supply the continuing tradetensions could force Beijing to blockthe sale of rare earth elements to theu.s. like it did against Japan in 2010following a territorial dispute over thesinker Kong Islands it would certainlybe extremely disruptive to large aspectsof the economy and so
I wouldn’t beginto be able to estimate the scale or theduration of how that would play out thefear is the technology cold war betweenChina and the US could lead to thecreation of a bipolar world it’s onewhere separate digital policies andstandards will divide the Chinese andu.s. fears of influence splitting the
supply chains and technology stack willcountries in Asia end up having tochoose sides between team China or TeamAmerica hopefully we don’t get into asituation where we have the truthbetween the u.s. or China but as thingsstand I think it is inevitable youprobably will have the choice betweenone insooner or later I think the knee isother quite frankly I mean no doubt usthey are the technology leader but youneed to have a manufacturing base andChina provide a very conducive place foryou to manufacture China’s promotion ofthe Belton Road initiative
Harry’spossibility that the Chinese will demandas a consequence of the distal offinancing and lots of investment theymay ask in return that these countriesbuy into the Chinese technologicalecosystem if you have population of 1.4billion people who are highlyentrepreneurial who basically yourneighbors you have no choice you will bedrawn within that sphere how many otherbig centers of influence are availabletoday
what I’m trying to say is thatperhaps the choice will be made for youyou don’t even have to choose it at theend of the day this is a period whenthere’s about as much fear of theirfuture as there’s ever been.
