The 5G drama was the first point where all of these different dimensions converged, and a template for the battles that will comprise this larger contest. It was the moment when China moved in so many countries from being a foreign policy and commercial matter to being an issue of high-stakes internal politics. When the Chinese government started threatening countries not over their meetings with the Dalai Lama or their dealings with Taiwan but whether or not they were willing to embed Chinese firms in their critical infrastructure. It was the catalyst for an ideologically diffuse group of politicians who decided to take the challenge on themselves when their governments refused to act. It was the moment when the United States woke up to the fact that critical elements of its China policy could no longer be run as a solo act, that it had to start getting allies on board that had never mattered to US strategy in this way before. When policymakers faced up to the question of how entire ideological, technological, economic and political systems interacted with each other, and whether the long intertwining of those systems needed to start being unraveled.

  * * *

  —

  To get a glimpse of what is at stake, take a stroll around Ericsson’s 5G showroom at their headquarters outside Stockholm. The hardware is a set of inconspicuous white boxes. Surrounding them is a vision of the near-future, the “Internet of Things” and “Smart Cities” given tangible form. There are remote ultrasound tests conducted using robo-gloves. Vehicles pictured on LCD screens are controlled by free-floating steering wheels and pedals. Industrial robotic arms undertake precision-engineering tasks. Colored lights pulsate across model football stadiums, apartment blocks and railway stations to illustrate the breadth and depth of the new network’s coverage.

  Each further generation of mobile technology has seen a dramatic evolution in the way life and commerce is conducted. The shift from 2G to 3G brought emails into the palms of our hands. The jump from 3G to 4G made possible the apps that have turned mobile devices into near-extensions of our brains. 5G promises something else: constant high-speed data of such a quality that industrial systems, medical operations and fleets of driverless cars can be run through it. It is a prospect that has seen 5G telecoms networks compared to the power grid in their centrality to the new economy.

  But in this very promise lies the risk. 5G networks will be even more deeply embedded in the hard-wiring of everyday life. The security questions at stake are no longer solely about spying on phone calls, locations and personal data, but the far vaster flows of sensitive information that will course through the mobile telecoms architecture, as well as the potential to disrupt the functions of the cars, hospitals, companies, production facilities and governments that come to rely on it.

  The system works differently from its predecessor. Most of the new functions on display at the Ericsson showroom are made possible by 5G’s low latency: data-processing is almost immediate, meaning that autonomous vehicles, for instance, are not subject even to the tiny lags that could be the difference between life or death in split-second decisions. This is achieved in part through processing more of that data at the periphery of the network. Unlike 4G, where the distinction between the “core” and the “edge” was sharply drawn between the brains of the network and the signal transmissions, 5G sees more intelligent functions moving out from the center; the decision to stop a driverless truck speeding towards a pedestrian or respond to rapid adjustments in a patient’s condition during remote surgery cannot wait to be refracted through a distant control site. There would also be a point in time when user traffic is unencrypted in the base station: a requirement in the standard to allow law enforcement agencies to intercept communications, but one that could be subverted.

  In addition, it requires prodigious increases in the lines of source code that run, optimize and secure the system. Experts characterize the distinction as a move from a hardware-centered model in 4G to a software-centered model with 5G. The perennial security issue—the potential for unnoticed backdoors—was difficult enough to manage already. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British signals intelligence agency, had noted in one of its reports that even when dealing with the existing 4G set-up, “it is just impossible to go through that much code and be absolutely confident you have found everything.” Now the volume was increasing exponentially. The result was that the United States no longer believed that the old risk-mitigation techniques for Huawei worked. The towers and antennae could be checked. At 5G scale, the code couldn’t. One White House official giving his briefings in Europe had a tried-and-tested routine with a pen and a phone that he would lay out on the table. He would quickly disassemble and reassemble the pen: “This you can take apart and inspect and it will not change.” With the phone, however, “every new update could change it completely.”

  And while the public debate was focused on “smoking guns” that would reveal Chinese data-siphoning from the existing systems, US warnings concentrated as much on the opportunities for coercion, and even the military risks of allowing a company beholden to the Chinese state to exercise so much control over such a vital set of economic functions. The ultra-secure communications used for intelligence-sharing may not rely on public 5G networks, but NATO’s capacity to mobilize effectively in a crisis with Russia certainly would.

  Even if countries ran into more prosaic political disputes with China, they could find themselves subjected to the same kind of deniable “technical issues” that Beijing was already so deft at conjuring into existence for trade partners it wanted to punish, from suspending exports of critical raw materials to Japan to barring virtually all trade with Lithuania through its elimination from China’s customs declaration system. In an inadvertent tell, telecoms operators in the UK threatened that the country would face network outages during the 5G transition phase if Huawei was excluded, precisely the kind of scenario that the United States had been warning British politicians the country might face if it made the wrong decision. As one European official put it:

  We have meetings with the US on “the proof” but the day you have “the proof” it’s too late. It’s a fallacy. The problem of espionage is not as important for 5G, it’s the risk of sabotage.

  But 5G was not only important because it was the subject of an intrinsic level of concern. It was just as significant for the symbolism and the imminence of the decisions. As one of the US officials most closely involved in the campaign put it:

  There are a number of critical technology issues and 5G happened to be the first one…We put AI, quantum, bioengineering, and these other areas together as if they’re like for like. But we’re talking about a grid being built and contracts being negotiated now. If you get it right, the other things will be easier. If you get it wrong, half the battle is already lost.

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  This book tells the story of how the major democracies broke from decades of thinking to identify China as the critical outside challenge to the system they had built. It explains why many of those closest to China became the agents of this shift, pressing their still-reluctant governments towards a revolution in their dealings with Beijing. It looks at the catalytic episodes, from 5G to the pandemic to the burgeoning Sino-Russian partnership, that finally illuminated the nature of the challenge and galvanized action. It also shows why it took so long to get there, despite countless wake-up calls in the preceding years.

  This is not a book about a great power competition. If we were only navigating a Washington-Beijing contest for primacy with a few superficial ideological trappings, it would be far easier for policymakers on all sides to manage. But it is an entire system that the Chinese party-state is challenging, a fact that Beijing has always been far clearer about than most of those on the receiving end. Much of the story is about how political elites in key capitals came to realize that seeing the problem through the prism of a rivalry between major powers is inadequate. Instead, not only would the Western democracies have to take on the military and economic challenge posed by China but they would also have to ensure that their own system still offered the best vision for humanity, at a time when that system had rarely looked more troubled. And they would also have to find new ways to pool their efforts, at a time when levels of mutual trust in the West had rarely looked lower.

  Yet China faces an equally profound set of struggles, and the book also tells the story of how Beijing’s failings in recent years have provided an opportunity to turn the tide. It looks at how a hubristic sense of Western decline led China to escalate its ideological and political challenge before the conditions were ripe. It details Beijing’s troubled efforts to build a rival coalition of its own, and how its plans to externalize the “China model” ran into resistance even from its closest partners. It concludes with the shock of the Ukraine war, and the Chinese vulnerabilities it exposed.

  Over the last twenty years, I have had a ringside seat to the China drama, the journey from deep and close intertwinement to the profound rupture with the West that we see in motion today. From my perches in Beijing, Washington, DC, Berlin, Brussels and London, and my research on how Chinese power is being exercised from Harare to Havana, Kabul to Okinawa, I have benefited from conversations with many of the protagonists in that drama at the time, as well as going back to ask them to re-examine those experiences from the vantage of hindsight.

  Inevitably, it is in part a story of regrets. The very first think-tank pamphlet I wrote, living in Beijing in the mid-2000s, was entitled “Preventing the Next Cold War”: both the costs of this outcome and the risks of it occurring have been evident for a long time, yet it was not inevitable that we would end up here. I am not among those who believe that the attempt to secure the best-case outcome—a China integrated into the system, seeing the scope to realize the ambitions of its people within parameters that we could all live with—was not worth trying. But those efforts have failed. If there is a silver lining, it is that the existential threat that China now poses to the system is creating the possibility for a different—and better—version as a result. To achieve that, though, we first need to make sense of how we got here.

  1

  WHEN DOVES CRY

  HOW THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE WOKE UP TO CHINA

  Washington, DC, September 2015

  THERE WAS ONLY A SINGLE OCCASION where I saw Xi Jinping up close. One of then-Vice-President Joe Biden’s advisors had added my name to the guest list for the official State Department luncheon during his 2015 state visit. Few at the time realized that it would be the valedictory occasion for a whole era in the US-China relationship. On a warm September morning, I duly joined the queue of luminaries on C street and trooped up to the Benjamin Franklin Dining Room on the eighth floor. Xi’s trip had the usual tensions hanging over it. Cyber-enabled economic espionage and the militarization of the South China Sea were the topics that captured the headlines ahead of his arrival. But it also had the usual bonhomie. Biden and the secretary of state, John Kerry, were there to fete Xi and the friendship between China and the United States, not to denounce their guest. Everything about the occasion exuded normality and the sense of continuity embodied by Henry Kissinger’s familiar position as the center of attention in the room.

  Watching the speeches on the archives now is like stepping into another age, a language and manner that would look jarring only a couple of years later. Kerry praised the two sides’ cooperation, buoyed by the recent climate deal ahead of the Paris talks: “When we’re pulling in the same direction, we can bend the curve of progress in a way that few other nations on earth can accomplish,” Kerry said.[1] Biden laid out what was then seen as a slightly edgy notion of “responsible competition” between the United States and China but also talked in depth about his personal relationship with Xi, saluting his “candor, determination, and capacity.”

  I was seated close to the speeches, the senator who would have obscured my view, Orrin Hatch, helpfully absent from the lunch. But as Kerry and Biden spoke it was hard to pull my eyes away from Xi Jinping. I was used to seeing the more stilted Chinese leaders who had emerged in recent times, the figures who were boxed in by the system, operating at its apogee but not fully commanding it, wary about missteps that might cost them back home. They were invariably awkward in rooms with Western politicians, rigidly reading their talking points without their eyes deviating from the text in front of them. The robotic demeanor of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, was a standing joke among many foreign officials.

  Xi had none of this. He exuded confidence and ease, as well he might. He had consolidated his power through the ruthless deployment of an anti-corruption campaign that purged some of the highest-ranking figures in the Party and state, as well as hundreds of thousands of lower-level officials. He was escalating China’s military posture in the South China Sea, and well into the rollout of ambitious plans for a new geo-economic initiative, then known as “One Belt, One Road,” that would augment China’s capacity to project power across the globe. But as he listened to the encomiums, he could afford to be sanguine. Despite all the US plans for rebalancing to Asia, there was little sense of urgency to it.

  The Middle East and Afghanistan still commanded the lion’s share of attention in Washington. There was endless White House agonizing about whether to go ahead with even basic freedom of navigation operations in the Western Pacific, and a pervasive impression that the administration’s desire for a climate agreement with Beijing had an unstated influence on wider US policy. One of the supposed successes of the visit, Xi’s pledge not to militarize islands in the South China Sea, was broken within the year. No element of his domestic repression or external assertiveness seemed to change the course of the bilateral relationship.

  Chinese friends attributed this in part to a long arc of fortune. From 9/11 to the Arab Spring via the global financial crisis, each time the United States seemed poised to take a harder look at its approach to China and concentrate its strategic attention on great power competition, circumstances seemed to conspire to suck it away again. But they also saw the luster of the Chinese market working its magic. The entire US economic agenda with China was steeped in the belief that the aim of US policy was to expand access for American firms.

  Whatever reforms US policymakers pushed on their Chinese counterparts were still mostly a means to this end. Even the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama administration’s ambitious Asian trade pact, was framed less as the basis of a genuinely alternative order that excluded China and more as a form of pressure on Beijing to return to the path of economic restructuring. Indeed, seen through this prism, Xi’s deepening authoritarianism was not even such a bad thing. A number of China hands and US corporate leaders with high-level Party connections in Beijing claimed that Xi’s ruthless accumulation of power was intended to make it possible to break the institutional gridlock of the Hu–Wen decade and give reform and opening a new lease on life.

  Meanwhile, for all the litany of complaints from foreign multinationals about Chinese non-market practices and forced technology transfer, the sense from Chinese officials was that even if they could no longer count on the corporate world to act as unabashed cheerleaders, the commercial interests at stake were now so large that they would ultimately suck it up. Much of the US tech sector was reaping substantial profits in China selling everything from semiconductors to software to iPhones, and using production bases and integrated supply chains there to keep their costs down. The CEO nearest to me in the queue outside the State Department that day, Tim Cook, had seen his company make $58.7 billion in China that year, 25 percent of Apple’s global revenues.[2] And some of the largest firms that were excluded had not given up hope of reaping the same benefits themselves. Before coming to DC, Xi had stopped off in Seattle to attend an internet industry forum, with the architect of China’s “great firewall,” Lu Wei, in train, the minister in charge of cyber-administration who would later find himself purged in Xi’s anti-corruption drive. Even Lu’s most prominent victims, the US platforms that his filtering made sure Chinese citizens could not access, gamely showed up anyway, personified by Mark Zuckerberg and his near-adulatory pursuit of Xi that saw him offer the leader of the Chinese Communist Party the opportunity to name his child.

  The same dynamics were equally apparent across the Western world. When I headed to a reception at the Chinese embassy near the end of Xi’s trip, one of the Chinese officials there was less interested in a postmortem than in talking rhapsodically about the British chancellor at the time, George Osborne. Osborne was the mastermind behind the announcement of a “golden era” of UK–China relations, which saw a virtual open door for Chinese investments even in sensitive sectors such as nuclear power. His rush earlier that year to make sure the UK was first to join China’s new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), over US objections, pushed other Europeans to expedite their own decisions lest they be perceived by Beijing as laggards.

  In talking to UK Treasury officials close to the process, they made clear that this was seen by Osborne and his advisors as a long-term bet: Britain had to be positioned to benefit from the next global power transition. The Chinese official commended the far-sightedness of the British and hoped that this approach from the very closest of US allies would blaze a trail for the rest of the West.