Unrivaled

Michael Beckley

Russia - China

Russia and China currently maintain a “strategic partnership,” but this relationship is unlikely to become a genuine alliance, because the two countries share a 2,600-mile border and a desire to dominate Eurasia—a goal that one side can accomplish only by subjugating the other. Perhaps a shared hatred of the United States will bring Russia and China together, but history suggests otherwise. At the start of the Cold War, China initially aligned with the Soviet Union, but by the 1960s the two Communist powers were literally at war with each other, and in the 1970s China officially switched sides and aligned with the United States.

Today, many Russian and Chinese strategists warn their respective governments not to place too much faith in a sustainable partnership. Foreign analysts come to similar conclusions. As one study explains: “[Sino-Russian] cooperation is limited to areas where their interests already overlap, like bolstering trade. In the parts of the world that matter most to them, Russia and China are more rivals than allies.”

For every example of Sino-Russian cooperation, there is a counterexample of competition. For instance, Russia sells weapons to China, but it recently reduced sales to China while increasing sales to China’s rivals, most notably India and Vietnam. Russia and China conduct joint military exercises, but they also train with each other’s enemies and conduct unilateral exercises simulating a Sino-Russian war. The two countries share an interest in developing Central Asia, but Russia wants to tether the region to Moscow via the Eurasian Economic Union whereas China wants to reconstitute the Silk Road and link China to the Middle East and Europe while bypassing Russia. Collectively, these conflicting interests have placed Russia and China “on a trajectory toward intensifying competition from latent to emergent rivalry.”

North Korea - China

North Korea is a formal ally of China, but China stations three Group Armies (roughly 150,000 troops) and a border defense brigade near their 880-mile shared border. 136 China maintains twenty-four-hour video and aerial drone surveillance of the border, has built bunkers there to protect Chinese forces against nuclear and chemical blasts, and has surged additional units to the border on several recent occasions, including in 2010 when North Korea shelled South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island; in 2013 after the purge of Jang Song Thaek, a high-ranking North Korean official and uncle of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un; in August 2015 after an out- break of hostilities between North and South Korea in the Korean demilitarized zone; and in 2017 when North Korea and the United States threatened each other with nuclear annihilation...

Entrepreneurs in China have reported spending roughly 70 percent of their time schmoozing with party members"..

Many Chinese college students describe their schools as 'diploma factories,' where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying 'Mao Zedong thought' ...

American live in a less toxic environment. Air pollution is seven times worse in China than in the United States and kills 1.6 million Chinese citizens each year versus 200,000 Americans. Breathing Beijing’s air is the equivalent of smoking forty cigarettes a day.

Whereas the United States can feed itself with only 1 percent of its workforce in agriculture, China devotes 30 percent of its workforce to farming—and still depends on food imports to feed its population... Economic development is, at its core, a process of structural change from agriculture to industry...

[O]ne-third of China’s GDP and 90 percent of its high-technology goods are produced by foreign firms that have merely set up factories in China to snap together components produced elsewhere. This practice, known as 'export processing,' accounts for 90 percent of China’s high-technology exports and 100 percent of China’s trade surplus. On average, of every dollar an American consumer spends on an item labeled 'Made in China,' 55 cents go for components and services produced in the United States. In other words, more than half of the content of 'Made in China' is American...

Since 2006, [CH] has tripled its spending on research and development (R&D), employed more scientists and engineers than any other country, and mounted the most extensive corporate espionage campaign in history. So far, however, these measures have failed to turn China into an innovation powerhouse...

According to a former Chinese biochemist turned whistle-blower, 'misconduct is so widespread among Chinese academics that they have almost become used to it.' China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud...

When Chinese firms imported foreign technology, they spent less than 25 percent of the total cost on absorbing the technology, a share far lower than the 200 to 300 percent spent by Korean and Japanese firms when they were trying to catch up to the West in the 1970s. As a result, many Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization...

[R]ecent internal investigations found that the PLA 'is riddled with corruption and professional decay, compromised by ties of patronage, and asphyxiated by the ever-greater effort required to impose political control.' According to U.S. intelligence assessments, 'the level of corruption in the PLA at least equals, and probably far exceeds, the level of corruption in the civilian economy.'...

[In a conflict with Taiwan] China would try to sink merchant ships supplying Taiwan, but rigorous research suggests that the PLA could sink only 1 to 6 percent of Taiwan’s shipping, and these results are based on assumptions that heavily favor China... China might hope that sinking a few merchant ships would deter others from supplying Taiwan. Historically, however, shipping companies and privateers have operated in wartime; in fact, many have volunteered to enter dangerous areas so that they could charge higher premiums. For example, the lure of profits kept seaborne commerce going throughout both world wars and the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, wars in which shipping losses were several times greater than what China could hope to inflict on Taiwan...

China’s nine nuclear-powered submarines (four strategic, five tactical) carry less than half the munitions of current U.S. submarines and are louder than U.S. submarines from the 1960s. Consequently, the U.S. Navy, which operates a sound surveillance system in the waters of East Asia, can track China’s nuclear-powered submarines at long ranges. China is developing its own sound surveillance system, but even when it becomes operational (the United States spent forty years developing its system) the PLA will have difficulty tracking U.S. submarines, which are so quiet that they sometimes reduce background noise as they pass by a target. China’s fifty-seven diesel-powered submarines are very quiet when running on their electric batteries, but they sail at half the speed and have half the endurance of U.S. nuclear-powered submarines, so they rarely leave China’s near seas..

[Due to amphibious difficulties] China, therefore, probably could not conquer Taiwan, even in the absence of U.S. intervention. Even if China’s prospects are better than I have suggested, the PLA clearly would have its hands full just dealing with Taiwan’s defenders. Consequently, the United States would only need to tip the scales of the battle to foil a Chinese invasion, a mission that could be accomplished in numerous ways without exposing U.S. surface ships or nonstealth aircraft to China’s [antiaccess-areadenial -A2/AD-] forces. Specifically, American defense planners estimate that it would take ten thousand to twenty thousand pounds of ordnance to decimate a PLA invasion force on the beaches of Taiwan. The U.S. military could deliver that payload many times over with a single B-2 bomber or an Ohio-class submarine firing cruise missiles from an underwater location hundreds of miles away. Alternatively, the United States could unleash its attack submarines on the PLA invasion fleet...

China’s neighbors have developed their own A2/AD capabilities, which can deny China sea and air control throughout most of its near seas—even without U.S. assistance...

China .. cannot enforce its South China Sea claims. The sea is a hotly contested zone, with five other countries laying claims to portions of ​it. China has a more powerful military than these Southeast Asian states, but they are closer than China to the areas of the sea that they claim. In a war, Chinese forces would need to cycle between the combat theater and a few bases hundreds of miles away in southern China to refuel and reload, a commute that would severely limit the amount of combat power China could sustain on the battlefield. Southeast Asian forces, by contrast, could operate from home bases bordering the combat theater and would have their full arsenals at their disposal...

China’s neighbors have shown that they are willing to use military force against China’s civilian vessels. Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, announced in 2016 that they would sink foreign vessels that fish or drill in their claimed waters in the South China Sea, and Indonesia made good on this promise at least three times in 2016, firing on Chinese fishing vessels and blowing them up on national TV—all while Chinese coast guard cutters watched from a distance...

[T]he Filipino president, Rodrigo Duterte, has repeatedly threatened to downgrade the U.S.-Filipino alliance, but he also has authorized the United States to upgrade its military facilities in the Philippines, ordered further reclamation on Philippine-held islands in the Spratlys, instructed Filipino troops to 'fight to the death' to defend these 95 ​islands against China, and threatened to raise the Philippine flag himself on Thitu Island and to ride out to other Chinese-claimed features on his jet ski and plant Philippine flags on them too...

North Korea

US has no good options and only one nonhorrible option: deterrence. North Korea will never give up its nuclear arsenal, which is its main insurance policy against a U.S. or South Korean attack, and the U.S. military cannot reliably destroy North Korea’s nuclear weapons or conventional artillery before it has a chance to use them...

The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that a U.S.-North Korean war would kill 20,000 people per day in South Korea alone, even if no nuclear weapons were used. It also admits that the U.S. national missile defense system only has a 50 percent chance of intercepting a North Korean ballistic missile headed for the U.S. mainland. Given these dire statistics, the United States should learn to live with a North Korean nuclear capability..

Deterrence, however, does not mean doing nothing. The United States should continue to make clear that it will “totally destroy” North Korea if it attacks the United States or its allies or transfers nuclear materials to other states or groups. To back up these threats, the United States should integrate additional terminal and midcourse interceptors to its national missile defense system and develop boost-phase interceptors...

North Korea will never negotiate away its nuclear arsenal, but it might accept limits on that arsenal in exchange for U.S. security assurances.

Education

[C]ross-national data suggest that the American system of teacher recruitment, training, and accountability has been put together backward: it draws teachers from the bottom half of college classes; gives them minimal training; and when teachers fail to improve student performance, the government imposes rigid standards, hoping to do on the back end what it failed to create on the front end. By contrast, countries with top PISA scores, such as Japan, Singapore, and Finland, do the opposite: they select teachers from the top third of college classes, train them rigorously, and then give them the freedom and time to hone their skills and share best practices with other teachers. As Harvard’s Jal Mehta has shown, such methods largely obviate the need for external accountability, because 'selection and preparation on the front end makes extensive monitoring on the back end unnecessary.'