Geopolitical game of Go in action...

15 Asia-Pacific countries form world's largest trading bloc accounting for nearly one-third of all economic activity; excludes US

Showdown at Big Data Gulch

Great power rivalry in the post-industrial era.  “There’s a shift from the weaponization of supply chains toward the weaponization of data and platforms. There hasn’t been much medium-to-long-term thinking about it yet -- but that’s starting to happen.”

Trust but verify - Coronavirus edition

The latest epidemic coming out of China has many highlighting the deadly inefficiencies of top-down authoritarian regimes.  As Nicholas Kristof puts it in his recent piece, "Dictators often make poor decisions because they don’t get accurate information."

Into this breach of trust... "BlueDot Inc a Toronto startup whose AI-driven health monitoring platform analyzes billions of data points... alerted its clients to the (coronavirus) outbreak on Dec. 31, well ahead of notifications from the World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention"

The Mandate of Heaven

The inimitable Charles Krauthammer, burdened by liberal enlightenment thinking, got China way wrong by inserting a phantom “People” element into “The Mandate of Heaven.” Three decades on, we may be about to see the sons of the Yellow Emperor contend with the very real “Heaven” of that term of art.

China's soft power projection...

China’s $270 billion in “diplomacy spending” since 2000 (source: Visual Capitalist)

The end of harmony?

The Boxer Rebellion, occurring roughly midway through China’s recent shambolic century bracketed by the First Opium War and the establishment of the People’s Republic, did have a positive outcome.  Alone amongst the Western Powers, the United States under President Roosevelt set aside a portion of its settlement share to “give back,” creating the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, which provided seed funding for Tsinghua University, known colloquially as China’s MIT, incurring inestimable soft power projection in the process.

The US has been and continues to be the “Shining City on the Hill” to the lot of aspirational mainland Chinese.  Even amidst its increasingly nationalistic posture, the nation is beset by a brain drain States-side.  A recent study noted that while the number of researchers who had received their undergraduate degrees in China and engaged in artificial intelligence research has risen tenfold in the past decade, nearly two-thirds are currently working in the US.

This relationship is undergoing a severe stress test.  The Economic Espionage Act (EEA) of 1996 makes theft or misappropriation of trade secrets a federal crime.  In its initial dozen years, 17% of defendants charged under EEA were of Chinese descent.  “After 2009, however, the percentage of Chinese espionage defendants tripled to 52%.”  While one can readily argue that commercial espionage on the part of the Chinese is a pressing matter, what’s troubling is its broad transference, as evidenced by what seems to be the recent targeting/purging of Asian cancer researchers in Houston, including long-time American residents.

These trends make the Huawei’s recent announcement of its Harmony OS all the more ironic.  The reception, frequently dismissive - often highlighting the challenges of persuading iOS/Android developers to port to the new OS, betrays the pundits’ provincialism.  With a nearly 40% share of the Chinese smartphone market, it’s not inconceivable for Huawei to command a larger installed base than the entire US population within the nation alone.  PRC smartphone app usage is dominated by a few tentpole apps, namely WeChat.  From a tech perspective, Android is a legacy mess, lacking a micro kernel architecture and possessing an unwieldy, potentially dangerous, diversity of distros.

These pundits also miss the fundamental point, that with this announcement we are witnessing what may be the initial stages of the Great Forking of tech, the erection of a “Silicon Curtain.”  Will this be the End of Harmony?