British Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency, GCHQ has warned that China was surging to overtake the West in critical technological areas. Pressing the panic button, the premier intelligence agency calls that the West must urgently act to ensure China does not dominate important emerging technologies and gain control of the global operating system.
Jeremy Fleming, Director of the GCHQ intelligence agency, said the West faced a battle for control of technologies such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics. In a candid acceptance of Chinese massive inroads into the critical areas, he said "significant technology leadership is moving to the East, and the concern is that China’s size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system." He added, "we are now facing a moment of reckoning" while delivering a speech at Imperial College London on 23 April.
Fleming said China was "bringing all elements of state power to control, influence design and dominate markets" while trying to dominate debates about global standards. He said digital currencies held significant promise to revolutionise the finance sector but posed a potential threat to liberties if abused by illiberal states as they could enable "significant intrusions into the lives of citizens and companies".
Russia remains the biggest immediate threat to the West but Communist China's long-term dominance of technology poses a much bigger problem, he said. "Russia is affecting the weather, whilst China is shaping the climate," he observed.
The GCHQ, which gathers communications from around the world to identify and disrupt threats to Britain, has a close relationship with the US National Security Agency and with the eavesdropping agencies of Australia, Canada and New Zealand in a consortium called "Five Eyes".
Couple of months back, the US National Security Commission has also described the Chinese threat as very, very real. Chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Eric Schmidt had called on the US government to fast track the development of emerging technology including artificial intelligence (AI) to catch up to China’s lead. The United States is “one or two years ahead of China, not five or 10” and “the Chinese are well ahead in areas like face recognition,” said Schmidt during a hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee on emerging technologies and their impact on national security on 23 February.
The US-China rivalry is essentially about who will control the global emerging technologies infrastructure and standards. Communist China is pushing hard to overtake the US domination in critical areas. China plans for a world without US technology.
In the last few years, Beijing has laid out several plans it hopes will turn China into a world leader in various tech areas:
The country is currently gearing up to release a 15-year blueprint known as “China Standards 2035” that will outline its plans to set the global standards for future technologies. In 2017, China announced its ambitions to become a global leader in the field of artificial intelligence by 2030. Five years ago, in 2015, Beijing unveiled a “Made in China 2025” plan to dominate global high-tech manufacturing.
Consequently. the technological rivalry will dominate the 21st-century world. But so far, democratic nations have not yet acted in concert to shape standards and secure their infrastructure in the face of a strong authoritarian challenge. In October 2020, a group of researchers from Europe, the US and Japan proposed a "tech alliance" of democratic countries in response to the Chinese government's use of technology standards and its tech sector as instruments of state power abroad.
The proposal says the status quo of uncoordinated and reactive technology policymaking for the major democratic technology powers in Asia, Europe and North America means a growing risk of ceding their technological leadership. The researcher argued that "having China’s government dictate the terms of the global economy is in no one’s interest but Beijing’s. It would erode the economic and national security of most countries."
The proposal, called "Common Code: An Alliance Framework for Democratic Technology Policy" has come up with a blueprint to establish digital privacy guidelines, secure supply chains and conduct joint research development.
Countering Chinese strides into these critical areas, Fleming called upon the world powers to shape the future by developing the best technology, hiring the people with the best brains and dominating the global standards that will govern the technologies.
