Published Jan 21, 2024
[]India’s] Atal Bihari Bajpayee’s “governance with least governance” model of public’s self-governance failed for reasons more than one. It failed to capture the ever-evolving nature of India’s demographics and economy, especially post LPG (Liberalization, Privatisation, and Globalization) policy reforms of 1991. Especially, for a country recovering from colonial devestations and grappling with poverty and overpopulation.
Both India and the western world have long ignored China’s ability to adapt and recover and ascend on many fronts, especially post 1978, famously associated with Deng Xiaoping’s announcement of the “Reform and Opening Up” policy. We were too busy mocking and caricaturing China as the “big bad guy” to learn from their successes. I see a lowest common denominator in all of China’s national successes, be it in their educational reforms and its returns, the economic front, manufacturing, businesses, reversing the brain-drain problem, and more. And that lowest common denominator is their experimental policy regime that catalyzed their economic rise. It is not only sensitive to their population restraints, in fact, they utilized their demographic dividend for better governance.
They are a large bureaucracy, much like the classic Soviet Union, yet the most successful. We usually assume systems like such don’t leave much scope for experimentation, adaptability, and innovation in policy, not with China however. China’s policy regime is agile, iterative, adaptive, dynamic, open to experimentation and learning from failures. Their willingness to experiment is what experts call “policy trials.” The basic idea is that before the government adopts a policy, it has already tested it in a delimited sector or a geographical area. This provides a great deal of space for policy makers to tinker with a given policy before rolling it out on a nationwide scale.
There’s some good news, though, for the rest of us. China is currently unable to produce cutting edge chips domestically, relying instead on imports. It has previously invested heavily in achieving this goal and failed. US should preserve and utilize the bottleneck, and its allies can and should take various actions to ensure that this remains the case.
What are the risks if China develops a domestic industry? This may lead to a cleavage of the semiconductor industry. What would be the effects of that happening? It may have significant destabilizing effects: mutual interdependence between states is stabilizing and it would reduce insight into China’s AI activities. Instead, a more concentrated supply chain, with fewer powerful actors, might be easier to govern.
China is investing in AI-enabled decision support systems for detecting nuclear attacks. How do Chinese policymakers and analysts view the stability of their nuclear deterrent? How do these views feed into their decisions around investments in new nuclear capabilities?
According to one scholar, there is a big difference over which risks Chinese and American analysts focus on: “In the United States, military analysts are often preoccupied with the concern that alarms or early warning systems, accidentally or even intentionally triggered, could produce false positives. Chinese analysts, in contrast, are much more concerned with false negatives” Saalman 2018. In contrast, others argue that Chinese forces “prioritize negative control over positive control of nuclear weapons to implement the strict control of the CMC and Politburo over the alerting and use of nuclear weapons” Cunningham 2019. Here, negative control refers to control against accidental or illegitimate use of nuclear weapons; positive control means control over always being able to execute a legitimate nuclear response.
Studying this would require finding and reading Chinese-language sources on this topic. It would also involve comparative analysis of the safety cultures of the western and Chinese nuclear communities. This is a tough but hugely important research area.