The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare

by Christian Brose

In this way, it is the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party that makes China’s inherently unobjectionable desire for advanced technologies so troubling. Since becoming president, Xi has mobilized China in an unprecedented and comprehensive pursuit of 5G communications networks, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and other advanced capabilities. Xi and other Chinese leaders seem convinced that these new technologies will enable China to “leapfrog” the United States and become the world’s preeminent power. Indeed, under Xi’s rule, Beijing sees advanced technologies as inextricably linked to China’s national identity and the Communist Party’s sense of destiny in restoring China to its rightful place at the center of world order.10 China’s ambitions to become the world’s technology superpower have been spelled out in a recent series of sweeping national strategies and industrial policies. Made in China 2025, issued in 2015, seeks to establish China as a world leader by 2025 in ten high-technology industries, including robotics, aerospace manufacturing, biotechnology, and advanced communications and information technologies, such as 5G networks.