In the past two decades, China has risen further and faster on more dimensions than any nation in history. As it has done so, it has become a serious rival of what had been the world’s sole superpower.
The Tokyo Olympics offers an apt analogy for reflecting on the much more consequential geopolitical Olympics in which China is challenging the United States today. In the century-long history of the modern Olympics, when did China win its first medal? Not until the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. Just a quarter-century later, in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China displaced the United States from its accustomed position as No.1—taking home forty-eight gold medals to the United States’ thirty-six. While the United States snapped back in 2012 and 2016, the outcome of this summer’s games looks to be tight. Most betting sites have the United States winning forty gold medals to China’s thirty-three. But curveballs and caveats abound: tight rules have banned spectators and excluded elite athletes who failed Covid-19 tests. Meanwhile, several favored U.S. Olympians have stumbled in early competition. Sportswriters can be forgiven for repeating Yogi Berry’s one-liner about baseball: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” In the geopolitical Olympics, China’s rise to rival the United States has been even more dramatic. Only two decades ago at the dawn of the twenty-first century, China did not even appear on the league tables of any geopolitical competition. Economically, it was classified as a “poor, developing country” (and thus allowed to join the World Trade Organization on terms reserved for developing economies). Technologically, with a per capita income at roughly the same level as Guyana and the Philippines, its citizens did not have enough money to buy advanced computers or cellphones, much less the resources to produce them. Militarily, it was for the Defense Department inconsequential, covered as what it called a “lesser included threat.” Diplomatically, it sat quietly, following Deng Xiaoping’s guidance to “hide and bide.” But that was then. In the past two decades, China has risen further and faster on more dimensions than any nation in history. As it has done so, it has become a serious rival of what had been the world’s sole superpower. Moreover, to paraphrase former Czech president Vaclav Havel, all this has happened so quickly that we have not yet had time to be astonished. Who is today the manufacturing workshop of the world? Who is the No.1 trading partner of most nations in the world? Who has been the principal engine of economic growth in the decade and a half since the Great Recession of 2008? By the yardstick that both the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Monetary Fund have concluded is the best single metric for comparing national economies, who has the largest economy in the world? In the military arena, who has eroded America’s competitive edge in every domain of warfare to the point that “today, every domain is contested: air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace”—in the words of former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis? While the United States remains the only global military superpower, in the Department of Defense’s most carefully constructed simulations of conflict over Taiwan, who has won eighteen of the past eighteen war games— according to former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work? Who is the largest producer and consumer of automobiles? Who does Elon Musk see as the largest market for Teslas and other electric vehicles? In the technology likely to have the greatest impact on economies and security in the next generation— artificial intelligence (AI)—who is the clear leader in facial recognition, voice recognition, supercomputers, and fintech—in the judgment of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google (which is the leading AI company in America)? Readers who hesitate before answering these questions will find bracing the forthcoming Report from Harvard’s China Working Group on the “Great Rivalry: China vs.
