China Has ‘First-Strike’ Capability To Melt U.S. Power Grid With Electromagnetic Pulse Weapon

[ChiTownDoc 21154]

21 minutes ago, Scheiss Meister said:

It may be my cynicism, but I am not convinced that the US would commit to a vigorous defense, and I am very, very certain that we would abandon any ally on a whim.  Our allies know this, too.

I committed a vigorous defense this morning.  

[NeverMarryAStripper 21907]

33 minutes ago, Scheiss Meister said:

It may be my cynicism, but I am not convinced that the US would commit to a vigorous defense, and I am very, very certain that we would abandon any ally on a whim.  Our allies know this, too.

This.  If I were China I would coordinate the EMP strike with civilian leadership assassination.  We would never be able to respond.  I can't imagine the American people supporting a war in support of some other country any more.  Hell, we barely support wars in support of us.

[ChiTownDoc 21154]

I love people on here acting like conventional warfare is still a thing.  Very cool.  
 

edit: shit.  Stripper asshole stole my thunder 

Edited July 26, 2020 by ChiTownDoc

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Horn of Gabriel said:

We're literally discussing a hypothetical, hop off your high horse.

I wasn't on any high horse.  You posted bullshit as if it were likely and multiple people called it out.

 

Doom and gloom.  Run with that shit.  Bold as fuck!!!

[Horn of Gabriel 1616]

1 minute ago, slorch said:

I wasn't on any high horse.  You posted bullshit as if it were likely and multiple people called it out.

 

Doom and gloom.  Run with that shit.  Bold as fuck!!!

LOL, let's go to the OP!

Quote

On "How Likely," I think the answer is "not very likely,"

...learn to read bud!

[Parliament 14260]

4 hours ago, Horn of Gabriel said:

So we have more cropland but we're more technology dependent than ever in ag production, from H20 control to harvest.  Not sure how that farmer is going to do it when his tech dies, no GPS automation, etc.  And even if he is able to do it all manually, in this scenario trucking and distribution is also knocked way down in capacity.

I grew up on a grain and vegetable farm, and I work in ag today.  If the GPS dies, you do it like we did in 1997; grab the steering wheel and actually drive.  There'd be an ungodly amount of resurrecting old, non-electronic equipment, and tech-hacking (think Mad Max) the newer stuff that got fried.  Lastly, the US exports 1/3 of our ag production.  ie, we can lose that much and be just fine. (Sucks for our export customers though.)  In March when Covid hit, our industry worked through a buncha hypotheticals that apply to this discussion.  Covid isn't as bad as an EMP attack, but the thought experiment is similar.

Your last sentence about trucking and distribution is a valid concern though.  NYC would have a rough go of it.

[BNB 100]

https://securethegrid.com/emp-technologys-worst-nightmare/

Quote

The Congressional EMP Commission, since disbanded, spent eight years developing a plan to protect all infrastructures from EMP – a plan that would also mitigate threats from cyber-attack, sabotage, and natural disasters that could be implemented in 3-5 years at a cost of $10-20 billion.
The Congressional EMP Commission estimated in 2008 it would cost $2 billion to harden the grid’s critical nodes (i.e., roughly 2,000 large and medium-sized transformers and their associated SCADA systems, etc.).  Modest when compared with the unimaginably high costs associated with trying to remediate after an EMP event.  Yet, it has been an excuse for inaction.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/04/05/whitehouse-prepares-to-face-emp-threat/#647b8d00e7e2

Quote

Time is of the essence and funding is vital. Securing the grid can be done at a reasonable cost in comparison to the destruction if an EMP attack were to take place. It is estimated that a massive EMP event could cause over $2 trillion in damages.

I don't think we have funded this, and we've known about EMPs for a decade. 20b vs. 2trillion seems like a no brainer, and 2 trillion  is just a number compared to the lives effected.

 

Edited July 27, 2020 by BNB

[B00M 6418]

That's a lot of money *checks notes* oh, $20B is a fucking rounding error? 

Edited July 27, 2020 by B00M

[El Diablo 4232]

The Chinese stir frying a bunch of US electronics that were purchased from the Chinese. What a time to be alive.

[Captainant 27680]

16 hours ago, slorch said:

Bullshit.  Crops will be just fine.

Keep on dooming and glooming.

The plants will be fine, but the ultra-computerized harvesting equipment won't be

[Guest]

53 minutes ago, Captainant said:

The plants will be fine, but the ultra-computerized harvesting equipment won't be

When H-E-B is closed, there are still ways to get food to people, city slicker...

Edited July 27, 2020 by slorch

[BabaYaga 15301]

11 hours ago, Parliament said:

I grew up on a grain and vegetable farm, and I work in ag today.  If the GPS dies, you do it like we did in 1997; grab the steering wheel and actually drive.  There'd be an ungodly amount of resurrecting old, non-electronic equipment, and tech-hacking (think Mad Max) the newer stuff that got fried.  Lastly, the US exports 1/3 of our ag production.  ie, we can lose that much and be just fine. (Sucks for our export customers though.)  In March when Covid hit, our industry worked through a buncha hypotheticals that apply to this discussion.  Covid isn't as bad as an EMP attack, but the thought experiment is similar.

Your last sentence about trucking and distribution is a valid concern though.  NYC would have a rough go of it.

Yep, but the earlier point that while we can grow a portion of our previous capacity, we'd have little to no way to distribute it.  Major metropolitan areas would be decimated by famine and crime.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

16 hours ago, Scheiss Meister said:

It may be my cynicism, but I am not convinced that the US would commit to a vigorous defense, and I am very, very certain that we would abandon any ally on a whim.  Our allies know this, too.

Again the question posed was would our allies come to OUR defense. Would we support our allies ?  I believe so. 

[Armybrat 40851]

1 hour ago, slorch said:

When H-E-B is closed, there are still ways to get food to people, city slicker...

My grandma grew most of her food in her backyard garden, plus she had a chicken coop. Grandpa supplemented that with Shooting a lot of squirrels & ducks, plus fishing. And he had a still.

 

Edited July 27, 2020 by Armybrat

[Parliament 14260]

Yep, but the earlier point that while we can grow a portion of our previous capacity, we'd have little to no way to distribute it.  Major metropolitan areas would be decimated by famine and crime.

There are (barely) enough pre-90's vintage trucks (large and small) to keep up somewhat. Keep up enough to keep people fed, but perhaps not enough to keep them from rioting.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

[BabaYaga 15301]

17 minutes ago, Parliament said:

There are (barely) enough pre-90's vintage trucks (large and small) to keep up somewhat. Keep up enough to keep people fed, but perhaps not enough to keep them from rioting.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk
 

It's the rioting I'm referencing.  As well as a lack of communication on plans to distribute items - so people take it upon themselves to rightly freak out and go nuts....as we're seeing across the West coast right now; magnified on an exponential scale. 

[FondrenRoad 4378]

6 hours ago, BNB said:

https://securethegrid.com/emp-technologys-worst-nightmare/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2019/04/05/whitehouse-prepares-to-face-emp-threat/#647b8d00e7e2

I don't think we have funded this, and we've known about EMPs for a decade. 20b vs. 2trillion seems like a no brainer, and 2 trillion  is just a number compared to the lives effected.

 

$20 billion and we won't do it?  The federal government has spent more than that on bathroom renovations.  It seems a no brainer at that price.

[atomheartbevo 89727]

On 7/25/2020 at 6:32 PM, Xian said:

Any ambiguity to what our response would be is dangerous.  If we plan on responding to an emp attack with nukes, it needs to be known. 

An EMP attack is a nuke attack.  No way we respond with anything less than nukes, especially since we could find ourselves in a situation where communications between civilian and military leadership are highly degraded.  You would have a leader who is dealing with a scenario of possibly losing command/control/communications with the rest of the nuke forces scattered around the world (China hitting us with an EMP, they aren't going to stop unless they think they can incapacitate our nuke forces to a large extent as well, because no way they leave that around).

But it won't be China.   I've been saying for a long time, it's a matter of time until some small country/organization/whatever parks a nuke off of a coastal city in a cargo ship.

[atomheartbevo 89727]

23 hours ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

If China hit us with any kind of a first strike our “allies” would fall all over themselves running the other way

Nope, they know they'd be next.  Otherwise they wouldn't bother with having their own nukes if it was just a matter of living under our nuclear umbrella.

[atomheartbevo 89727]

21 hours ago, Horn of Gabriel said:

If you're looking for something different to worry about, it's not China doing an EMP, it's the delivery and technology becoming commoditized enough that a shithole country or terrorist group is able to execute it.  Who do we fire our nukes at when some anonymous terror group pilot a container ship in the Pacific or Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico right up to our doorstep and fires off an EMP from there?  Container delivered nukes/EMPs are very possible right now.  I'm a lot more worried about a country with nothing left to lose than I am China.

1234.   When you have places like Pakistan with nukes, and the Saudis and Iranians and others working on it/have worked on it, and with the thousands of cargo ships moving around at any one time...

[Captainant 27680]

15 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

An EMP attack is a nuke attack.  No way we respond with anything less than nukes, especially since we could find ourselves in a situation where communications between civilian and military leadership are highly degraded.  You would have a leader who is dealing with a scenario of possibly losing command/control/communications with the rest of the nuke forces scattered around the world (China hitting us with an EMP, they aren't going to stop unless they think they can incapacitate our nuke forces to a large extent as well, because no way they leave that around).

But it won't be China.   I've been saying for a long time, it's a matter of time until some small country/organization/whatever parks a nuke off of a coastal city in a cargo ship.

EMP's aren't strictly nukes, and they can be loaded as a payload onto missiles, drones, etc. It's basically a big bank of capacitors dumped into a microwave generator, an antenna, and a magnetic flux compressor. No fallout, no physical (blast) damage, but the same electronic-frying burst of EM radiation.

[Smax 3800]

I’m guessing our anti EMP defense is just like our anti Covid defense.  I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going to start studying Mandarin 

There are more people in China who speak fluent English then there are English speakers in The USA.

[smuggs 9353]

1 minute ago, Captainant said:

...and a magnetic flux compressor. 

[Parliament 14260]

EMP's aren't strictly nukes, and they can be loaded as a payload onto missiles, drones, etc. It's basically a big bank of capacitors dumped into a microwave generator, an antenna, and a magnetic flux compressor. No fallout, no physical (blast) damage, but the same electronic-frying burst of EM radiation.

We know.



Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

[atomheartbevo 89727]

20 hours ago, slorch said:

Bullshit.  Crops will be just fine.

Keep on dooming and glooming.

Irrigations systems go out/stop working.  That becomes a problem for some operations.

Farmers in rural Texas grow plenty of food.  They don't know that people in Austin or Dallas are starving if communications are down.  If they can get an old truck or two running, that doesn't mean that the processing plant is up and running.  And if they pull that off, that doesn't mean the storage facilities are up and running.  Plenty of food products need a cool/dry place for storage, and plenty of the equipment that runs those facilities are vulnerable to EMP.

Oh, and let's hop back to the farming part.

Do you realize how computerized everything is these days?  Shit, John Deere claims they own the software running through newer John Deere tractors, and that code is locked away from the owners (who they think don't own the tractors, but just have a license to use them), so the days of yore when farmers could easily repair their own tractors has long since passed.  Shit, John Deere thinks you shouldn't even be able to repair your own tractors.  And farmers are having to download firmware from Eastern European countries.  In recent years, more and more farmer are buying used equipment (or cannibalizing it) that doesn't require them having to go to extremes to repair them, so there's not a lot of good used equipment lying around, waiting to be pressed into service.

So actually, we are pretty fucking vulnerable.  Farmers can feed themselves, but getting it to the folks who don't live on farms is a completely different beast of an issue.

[atomheartbevo 89727]

19 hours ago, Horn of Gabriel said:

Then again, if I were a terrorist with the ability to do an EMP attack, I'd probably just go straight for a nuke attack in a major city; maybe less impactful geographically but more impactful psychologically.

And the thing is, you could do multiple low-level dirty attacks with existing technology on a small scale, that would fuck up a nation.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Irrigations systems go out/stop working.  That becomes a problem for some operations.

Farmers in rural Texas grow plenty of food.  They don't know that people in Austin or Dallas are starving if communications are down.  If they can get an old truck or two running, that doesn't mean that the processing plant is up and running.  And if they pull that off, that doesn't mean the storage facilities are up and running.  Plenty of food products need a cool/dry place for storage, and plenty of the equipment that runs those facilities are vulnerable to EMP.

Oh, and let's hop back to the farming part.

Do you realize how computerized everything is these days?  Shit, John Deere claims they own the software running through newer John Deere tractors, and that code is locked away from the owners (who they think don't own the tractors, but just have a license to use them), so the days of yore when farmers could easily repair their own tractors has long since passed.  Shit, John Deere thinks you shouldn't even be able to repair your own tractors.  And farmers are having to download firmware from Eastern European countries.  In recent years, more and more farmer are buying used equipment (or cannibalizing it) that doesn't require them having to go to extremes to repair them, so there's not a lot of good used equipment lying around, waiting to be pressed into service.

So actually, we are pretty fucking vulnerable.  Farmers can feed themselves, but getting it to the folks who don't live on farms is a completely different beast of an issue.

Yeah, I  lived on a farm where nobody ever had anything but the newest, cutting edge technology and we just shitcanned all of the old stuff, just like a Dallasite and their beemer.

You left out the part about the nanobots in the livestock and  migrant workers.  They'll all just keel over as well.

 

I love how some of y'all are in love as fuck with the notion that  American ingenuity is just [poof!]  gone like a fart in the wind.  We all dead at the Chinaman's whim...LOlz.  Let's fret and worry like hell.

[NeverMarryAStripper 21907]

I guess you never read the social media of people in this country

[ztejas 43475]

21 minutes ago, Smax said:

fluent English

Is that what they call it?

[crash_davis 23113]

China is preparing for the Matrix/Terminator final boss fight against the Machines. We will thank then in a few decades.

[crash_davis 23113]

I have no questions that China, Russian and the US all have plans to defeat each other's counter-measures. We've all spent billions (probably trillions) developing ingenious and destructive ways of sending the world back to the dark ages. All it will take is for one country to be backed into a corner, then it's good bye most of the world.

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

I guess you never read the social media of people in this country

You have an absolutely valid point.   They make me tired  too. 

 If it's on FB or whatever they are friends/ family.  I [gently] stir the pot and let them know they are are off the reservation of sanity.

If it's on Twitter or whatever, might as well shoot a bb gun at a tank...

Edited July 27, 2020 by slorch

[davidg 4038]

22 hours ago, BNB said:

This was a fun read.

https://www.amazon.com/Second-After-John-Matherson-Novel/dp/0765327252

Forstchen based his research for One Second After on the 2004 bipartisan Congressional study of the potential threat to the continental United States from an EMP attack: Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. Drawing on this and other government and private studies, Forstchen explores by fiction what might happen in a "typical" American town in the wake of an attack on the United States with electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) weapons.[2] Forstchen has been invited to make presentations regarding the threat of EMP before members of Congress, and at STRATCOM, Sandia Labs, and NASA.

 

21 hours ago, Horn of Gabriel said:

If you really want to go down the rabbit hole on this, read the One Second After book trilogy by William Forstchen.  Just don't be surprised when you turn into a prepper.

Read a bunch of the EOTWAWKI books a while back and really liked the first of Forstchen's book series. I read an unedited pdf version of David Crawford's Lights Out  https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-David-Crawford/dp/0615427359 when it was first put on on some fan-fiction or prepper website and liked it even though the was very tedious in its detail of every last thing.   77 Days in September by Ray Gorham and Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank rounded out the fiction that that post-apocalyptic genre.

 

Ted Koppel came out in 2015 with a book called Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath which is a pretty good treatise on EMP and how un-prepared our nationwide utility system would be to even small scale events.

 

 

 

 

[NeverMarryAStripper 21907]

Yes, but the ignorant and incorrect English eventually gets put in the dictionary so that it is correct.  Then the Chinamen are speaking incorrect English.

Edited July 27, 2020 by NeverMarryAStripper

[Orange&White 5528]

2 hours ago, FondrenRoad said:

$20 billion and we won't do it?  The federal government has spent more than that on bathroom renovations.  It seems a no brainer at that price.

Think of it like a light rail project. If they say $20B, it will be $400B and it will only achieve 25% of what was promised.

[ztejas 43475]

21 minutes ago, Dr. Beeper said:

I guarantee you one could find 400 million Chinamen (because they killed all their Chinawomen) that speak better English than this country.

Yeah I pretty confidently guarantee that you couldn't. I'm less than a year removed from going to grad school with a lot of them, and those students are probably towards the top in terms of English "fluency". I went to undergrad with plenty more.

Most of their English is about as good as my Spanish, and I sure as shit wouldn't consider myself fluent in Spanish (although I was fairly close at one point).

Edited July 27, 2020 by ztejas

[Blotto 23559]

The shit some of you guys get your panties in a wad over. This article could have been identical except reverse the roles of the US and China, and everybody would nod approvingly of our ingenuity and military might. It even points out that we still spend 3X what China spends on military initiatives like this. We survived 50+ years of nuclear tensions because everybody understands that nobody wins once the warheads start flying. Explain to me the benefit to China when we immediately stop buying Chinese shit becuase we are too busy eating each other. When you see this shit like this just remember that we are in an election year, and China has been identified as public enemy #1. 

[Armybrat 40851]

5 hours ago, El Diablo said:

The Chinese stir frying a bunch of US electronics that were purchased from the Chinese. What a time to be alive.

No worries, just go mechanical at Harbor Freight.

[Orange&White 5528]

5 minutes ago, ztejas said:

Most of their English is about as good as my Spanish, and I sure as shit wouldn't consider myself fluent in Spanish (although I was fairly close at one point).

 

[Armybrat 40851]

1 minute ago, Blotto said:

The shit some of you guys get your panties in a wad over. This article could have been identical except reverse the roles of the US and China, and everybody would nod approvingly of our ingenuity and military might. It even points out that we still spend 3X what China spends on military initiatives like this. We survived 50+ years of nuclear tensions because everybody understands that nobody wins once the warheads start flying. Explain to me the benefit to China when we immediately stop buying Chinese shit becuase we are too busy eating each other. When you see this shit like this just remember that we are in an election year, and China has been identified as public enemy #1. 

I vote that we send them fitlump and Miley Cyrus in retaliation.

[Blotto 23559]

Just now, Armybrat said:

I vote that we send them fitlump and Miley Cyrus in retaliation.

I'll throw in the entire Kardashian klan as well for some old school viral warfare. 

[NeverMarryAStripper 21907]

5 minutes ago, Blotto said:

The shit some of you guys get your panties in a wad over. This article could have been identical except reverse the roles of the US and China, and everybody would nod approvingly of our ingenuity and military might. It even points out that we still spend 3X what China spends on military initiatives like this. We survived 50+ years of nuclear tensions because everybody understands that nobody wins once the warheads start flying. Explain to me the benefit to China when we immediately stop buying Chinese shit becuase we are too busy eating each other. When you see this shit like this just remember that we are in an election year, and China has been identified as public enemy #1. 

Well the difference is that China has almost certainly gamed this out in order to know what steps they need to take to make it happen.  Meanwhile, we make our military hardware decisions based on the congressional district it's manufactured in.

Edited July 27, 2020 by NeverMarryAStripper

[Rougarou 594]

4 minutes ago, Blotto said:

The shit some of you guys get your panties in a wad over. This article could have been identical except reverse the roles of the US and China, and everybody would nod approvingly of our ingenuity and military might. It even points out that we still spend 3X what China spends on military initiatives like this. We survived 50+ years of nuclear tensions because everybody understands that nobody wins once the warheads start flying. Explain to me the benefit to China when we immediately stop buying Chinese shit becuase we are too busy eating each other. When you see this shit like this just remember that we are in an election year, and China has been identified as public enemy #1. 

The world-- specifically the individuals, who inhabit the world-- is different. Community and Group/Team Health is broken. We are a conglomeration of individuals whose individual needs matter more than yours, so I'm not so sure the bolded above still follows. If it does, it's hanging on a thread and a couple more Instagram likes is going to drop it. We see countless examples of this change (cue the "FUPM" or "I got mines" memes) in ideals, values, behavior and ultimately policy. We have a President who could be trolled to pushing the big red button, I think. Not to be a fear monger, but nuclear war, civil war, catastrophic war, whatever-- all more probable and likely today and tomorrow than yesterday and the day before.

Just follow the sociology and trends.

[RDCanecutter 26452]

6 hours ago, Captainant said:

The plants will be fine, but the ultra-computerized harvesting equipment won't be

The harvesting equipment? You mean all those skinny kids standing over there?

[RDCanecutter 26452]

4 hours ago, Parliament said:

There are (barely) enough pre-90's vintage trucks (large and small) to keep up somewhat. Keep up enough to keep people fed, but perhaps not enough to keep them from rioting.
 

[washparkhorn 9939]

Long read - The state of the new Cold War with China - China's economic response is forming under a doctrine called the "Dual Circulation Strategy."  https://www.noemamag.com/chinas-radical-new-vision-of-globalization/

China’s Radical New Vision Of Globalization

President Xi’s vision of “dual circulation” is a darkly pessimistic economic strategy, fit for a new Cold War.

SINGAPORE — Back in August, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with a group of economists in Beijing. “In the coming period, we will face more and more headwinds,” he explained, using unusually blunt language. Without naming names, Xi talked about China’s worsening trade and technology war with the United States under President Donald Trump, set against a backdrop of growing certainty in Beijing that America is bent on containing his nation’s geopolitical rise.

Quote

 

But then came the interesting part. “Since the beginning of this year, I have said on many occasions that we must promote the formation of a new development pattern, in which domestic and international cycles are the mainstay, and the domestic and international dual cycles promote each other,” Xi said. To an outsider, this might seem unremarkable, cloaked as it is in the elliptical phraseology that often marks Chinese economic ideas. But the “dual circulation” strategy Xi outlined actually represents a radical new understanding of globalization and of China’s place within it.

More than just a buzzword, dual circulation describes the deeply pessimistic worldview that has settled over Beijing. Once China’s leaders saw opportunity in globalization. Now, they expect the U.S. and its allies to deny China the technology it needs to build “a modern socialist country” by mid-century, meaning a wealthy superpower fit to rival the U.S. Although likely to be less pugilistic, Beijing rightly believes an incoming Biden administration will also press forward with policies designed to stop advanced technologies finding their way into Beijing’s hands. Chinese thinking has long valorized self-reliance, dating back to ideas developed by former Chinese leader Mao Zedong during the country’s civil war, which ended with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Now, Trump’s tariffs, as well as his campaigns against companies like Huawei and TikTok, have given new impetus to the modern form of self-reliance Xi dubs “internal” development.

Many experts have noted a changing Western consensus on China, as leaders in Washington abandoned the idea that economic modernization would inevitably lead to political liberalization in Beijing. But there has been a comparable shift in China’s internal conversation on the West too. Beginning with semiconductors but potentially expanding to all manner of other areas, China now expects it will have to develop technologically on its own. Xi’s new theory now sits at the heart of the country’s 14th five-year plan, which covers development from 2021 to 2025, and was unveiled in draft form in October. The result will accelerate China’s decoupling from the West, while also increasing the importance of trading links forged with other parts of the world — for instance, via Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. Put more bluntly, while the world was distracted by the drama of the U.S. presidential election, Xi quietly unveiled an economic strategy fit for a new Cold War. Both for China and for globalization itself, the results are likely to be profound. 

“China expects the U.S. and its allies to act ever more aggressively to deny China the technology it needs.” 

 

Spoiler

 

To see how much China’s consensus has changed, recall Xi’s remarks at Davos in 2017. There, he portrayed globalization not as a threat, but as an inevitability. “The global economy is the big ocean that you cannot escape from,” he suggested. “China will vigorously foster an external environment of opening-up for common development.” Just as Trump was turning against the idea, China would act as steward of the existing global order. It would even help to remedy many of the problems that rapid integration had caused, Xi argued, from economic inequality to climate change.

Three years later and, under dual circulation, things look much different. The idea splits the world into two systems. First comes external circulation, meaning China’s global trade, but also the way it invites foreigners into its domestic economy. This was the focus of Xi’s Davos remarks and the approach that powered his country’s decades of rapid growth, transforming China into an exporting powerhouse. The second component is then internal circulation, meaning domestic demand from Chinese consumers, but also domestic supply chains and “made in China” technologies. 

This division shares something in common with “reform and opening up,” a phrase that has dominated China’s economic thinking for decades. That idea suggested Beijing should reform its domestic (or internal) economy to make it more market-led, while also opening up to the (external) world via globalization, gaining new ideas, production techniques and technologies along the way. Dual circulation also echoes longstanding attempts to wean China off a growth model dominated by exports and infrastructure investment and build instead the kind of consumption-led economy common in rich countries.

Such attempts have been only partially successful. A decade ago, about 34% of China’s economy came via domestic consumption, less than half the level in the U.S. at the time. By 2019, this has reached just 39% — progress, of a sort, but hardly dramatic. When the phrase dual circulation first emerged earlier this year, many saw it as merely yet one more push toward this long-term objective of Chinese internal economic rebalancing. 

“Beginning with semiconductors but potentially expanding to all manner of other technologies, China now expects it will have to develop economically on its own.” 

It is China’s deteriorating geopolitical environment that marks dual circulation as a decisive break from the past, however. “China thinks there is a good prospect of even worse relations with the U.S. and its friends in the coming years,” I was told recently by Li Mingjiang, a Chinese political scientist based in Singapore and long-time observer of Beijing’s intricate political economy. “So, it needs to do something about it.”

It is not hard to see why. Trump’s tariffs and battles over soybeans generated more headlines, but it is advanced technology that really matters in Beijing. China is a global tech leader in some sectors, from online payments to artificial intelligence. But it lags in others. Despite its geopolitical heft, it still remains a firmly middle-income economy, with a gross domestic product per capita of roughly $9,700 — about on par with Kazakhstan and roughly half that of Greece. Access to cutting-edge technology is critical in changing this, especially as its economy moves away from the kind of basic exported manufactured goods that have long dominated its growth model.

Over recent decades, China has had many routes to acquiring such technology. Often, it simply bought it, as when Chinese companies snapped up everything from Rolls Royce jet engines to Qualcomm semiconductors. Foreign businesses rushed to set up Chinese operations, often as part of local joint ventures, eager to tap into a vast consumer market. Chinese businesses bought foreign technology groups, while Chinese academics and scientists built partnerships at the world’s best universities. Beijing employed darker methods too, from forced technology transfer to outright intellectual property theft. But there were always plenty of legitimate avenues to go with them. 

“Xi has quietly unveiled an economic strategy fit for a new Cold War.” 

Now, many of these routes are closing fast. Rather than tariffs, America’s “entity list” has proved its most potent weapon. Back in 2016, President Barack Obama first used this process in accusing ZTE, China’s second-largest telecoms supplier, of selling U.S. technologies to Iran, crippling the Chinese company in the process. Trump then escalated this approach, banning U.S. businesses from trading with dozens of Chinese enterprises, from state-owned giants to niche artificial intelligence providers with links to Xinjiang and its embattled Muslim Uighur minority. More recent measures unveiled this August hit foreign suppliers too, for instance stopping semiconductor operators in Taiwan from selling to Chinese entities. Huawei has been one high-profile victim, leading experts to question whether China’s state-linked tech champion can survive.

What started with semiconductors is unlikely to end there, however, hence dual circulation’s underlying pessimism. Under Trump, the U.S. has unveiled a range of further measures limiting China’s technology access, from its 2018 Export Control Reform Act to more targeted measures in areas like geospatial imagery software. Allies in Europe are being cajoled to follow suit. Many Western governments have also acted to stop China from buying up advanced tech companies entirely, while also limitingacademic collaborations with Chinese partners. The recent battle over TikTok was illustrative too, showing how rapidly the U.S. has lowered the bar on what counts as a national security threat, a category that now includes not just critical 5G telecoms architecture of the sort provided by Huawei, but also jocular teenage social media platforms.

Elsewhere, U.S. strategists are particularly vexed by China’s doctrine of “military-civil fusion,” which mandates that technologies acquired by China’s private sector must be shared with its armed forces. The problem is that, when you look hard enough, almost anything can potentially be seen as a dual-use technology, from nuclear equipment and renewable energy batteries to civilian aircraft, drones and autonomous vehicles. 

“Xi’s plans clearly place more emphasis on domestic production and state control.” 

Then there are still gloomier scenarios. I spoke recently with a well-connected Chinese academic with close ties to Beijing’s policy-making circles, to try and understand more about dual circulation’s development. “China is preparing ‘plan B,’ which at first is what happens when international supply chains are shut off,” he suggested, while asking to remain anonymous. China now assumes that its technology access will shrink no matter what actions Xi takes, he went on. But then there is the more alarming question of what more disruptive actions China itself might actually begin. “A lot of this is about preparations for a possible war across the Taiwan Straits,” the academic said.

Officially, China aims to reunify with Taiwan by 2049. But Beijing has toughened its language of late, removing talk of “peaceful reunification” from government documents. Many analysts think Xi plans to force the issue sooner rather than later, in pursuit of a long-term national objective that could cement his legacy as a truly great national leader. Yet any attempt at unification using military means, even in scenarios short of war, would be highly risky. China would almost certainly be hit by global sanctions, providing yet one more justification for the urgent development of domestic technology. 

Whatever China’s thinking, developing domestic technology is easier said than done. China has pushed similar plans before, including its recent “Made in China 2025” scheme to develop world-leading capabilities in nearly a dozen sectors, from ships to power equipment and advanced industrial materials. Chinese officials have spent decades sinking funds into semiconductors in particular, only to find their products still lag far behind world leaders such as the U.S. and Taiwan. Just pouring in money is often ineffective. “We need to realize that new [technologies] aren’t like roads and bridges that can be completed with a lot of funding,” as one senior Chinese official recently put it. “A lot of government-funded projects may end up going nowhere. … We need to let market forces decide how much and where to invest.”

“This gradual decoupling between China and the West will be far more significant than the divisions of the Cold War.” 

Quite how dual circulation will work in practice is hard to tell so far, as is often the case when China launches a big new idea. Much the same was true for Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure scheme back in 2013, which gradually transformed from a vague slogan into a globe-spanning behemoth with investments totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. Dual circulation’s details will take time to flesh out, beginning when the full details of China’s next five-year plan emerge in early 2021. But Beijing has plenty of measures at its disposal, from industrial policies that plough cash into specific technologies to investment in more fundamental scientific research. Other reforms will aim to make it easier to raise capital or help entrepreneurs start technology businesses, while a broader set of policy changes aims to boost domestic consumption overall, for instance by facilitating urbanization or allowing greater mobility of labor by scrapping China’s restrictive “hukou” system of local work permits. 

Will it work? Some elements of Xi’s approach look similar to the more established economic idea of “import substitution.” This largely discredited theory led many emerging economies to block imports of foreign goods in an attempt to force consumers to buy domestically-produced products instead, from cars to machine parts. Yet while this failed to spur development in smaller countries like Sri Lanka and Tanzania, it might work better in an economic giant like China, with its 1.4 billion consumers, clear economies of scale and heavy tradition of investment in research and development.

One further question is exactly how pessimistic China will be. Beijing might adopt a wait-and-see approach, moving to develop local options only when it is indeed cut off from global supply chains. But developing new domestic technologies can take decades, while the humiliation of seeing companies like ZTE and Huawei hobbled by sanctions has scarred policymakers in Beijing. If China thinks there is a risk it will eventually be cut off, it may well begin developing alternatives now — a step that is likely to come with significant short-term costs. 

“Dual circulation remains a highly risky strategy for China, not least given the prospect it brings of permanently lower growth.” 

China’s leadership is at pains to argue that dual circulation does not in fact mark a retreat into isolation. Xi stressed this point in another recent speech, this time in October to mark the 40th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, whose launch in 1980 is often credited as the starting point of China’s long march back into the global economy. China would continue to seek foreign investment, he argued: “The new development pattern is not a closed domestic circulation, but an open domestic and international dual circulation.” Some foreign companies may even find it easier to enter China’s market in the future, albeit only in a handful of sectors like financial services and consumer goods. But Xi’s plans clearly do place more emphasis on both domestic production and state control. China has drifted steadily in a statist direction under his rule, a trend that now only seems likely to accelerate, especially in strategic areas already dominated by state-owned enterprises, like telecoms or defense.

This change will be noticed in particular in sectors linked to China’s core digital infrastructure, a fact that also helps to explain one of the most intriguing episodes in recent Chinese economic history: the last-minute cancellation in October of the floatation of Ant Group. The Alibaba affiliate was set to become the world’s largest-ever initial public offering, potentially raising as much as $37 billion, until Chinese regulators claimed the fintech giant had failed to comply with regulatory changes designed to protect consumers from the mis-selling of financial products. Speculation soon focused on Jack Ma, Alibaba’s charismatic founder, and his recent speech criticizing China’s state-run banks. But Ant’s fall from grace illustrates a wider push by China’s state to exert control over the high-flying private tech businesses that dominate its consumer internet space, including both Alibaba and Tencent.  

“China’s drive for domestic innovation might succeed, potentially leaving Western nations unable to access potentially valuable homegrown Chinese technologies.” 

Whatever its rationale, many of dual circulation’s economic repercussions will be harmful. Chinese economic growth is almost certain to be lower, imperiling Xi’s target of doubling the size of China’s economy by 2035. Levels of innovation and productivity may stagnate too, as government funds are channeled into wasteful white elephant investment projects. There could be significant ramifications for the global economy too. Gradual economic decoupling between China and the West will be more significant than the divisions of the original Cold War, given so little prior trade existed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union bloc.

This does not mean China will retreat wholesale from globalization. Dual circulation actually makes it all the more important that China cultivates deep relationships with those advanced economies that are still keen to do business, including those on its doorstep in Asia, like Singapore and South Korea. It also makes it more likely that China will focus economic efforts on its Belt and Road Initiative partner nations across Southeast and Central Asia as well as in Africa and Latin America. Such an approach would fit well with China’s longer-term ambitions for the Belt and Road Initiative too, which always aimed at more than simply dotting the globe with new ports, railways and power stations. Instead, China’s intention is the gradual creation of a new economic “sinosphere,” in which global networks of trade and innovation that once focused on the industrialized West flow back and forth to China instead.

“A Chinese leadership with less of a stake in the global technology ecosystem may become a more disruptive global actor — with Taiwan the most obvious and alarming potential example.” 

In all this, dual circulation remains a highly risky strategy for China, not least given the prospect it brings of lower growth denting the legitimacy of China’s ruling Communist Party. Beijing has brought much of this policy choice on itself, however. Under Xi, China’s politics have grown more authoritarian, its economy more statist and its foreign policy more threatening, both to its neighbors in Asia and to the West. Its drive to acquire new technology over recent decades has been marred both by intellectual property theft, as well as its myriad of broken promises to liberalize its state-dominated economic model. 

Yet, dual circulation comes with equally forceful dilemmas for the West too. If the U.S. does aspire to keep a global, open, rules-based system in the future, it must weigh carefully the risks that come from pushing China to step more decisively away from that model. This leaves awkward questions for President-elect Biden. At one level, China’s drive for domestic innovation might actually succeed, leaving Western nations unable to access potentially valuable Chinese technologies in the future. At another, a Chinese leadership with less of a stake in the global technology ecosystem may become a more disruptive global actor in other areas — with Taiwan the most obvious and alarming potential example.

Dual circulation ultimately suggests that Trump’s tenure has been more influential than his critics would like to admit. He lost America’s recent election, but his erratic and aggressive policies have succeeded in convincing Chinese elites that the U.S. is now irrevocably set on blocking China’s technological rise. Biden must weigh carefully whether that is indeed his intention too. Much depends on his answer. 

 

 

[B00M 6418]

Fuck Xi

[Parliament 14260]

They're getting boxed out for several reasons, one being patent violation and intellectual property. You hate to be a jerk towards them, but we can't abide that.

[TKthunder2 4992]

They're getting boxed out for several reasons, one being patent violation and intellectual property. You hate to be a jerk towards them, but we can't abide that.

[TonyTexas 10516]

They also have 1st strike capabilities against wasp nests