In his lead forum essay, Captain Jerry Hendrix addresses the challenges of a multipolar world by envisioning “a broad alliance structure made up of self-determined democracies pursuing free market economies” in opposition to the “new authoritarian bloc” of Russia and China. He has done a great service by resituating America’s strategic position in the face of great power competition’s return. Hendrix, however, maintains that today’s multipolar world is a return to business as usual. I argue, instead, that today’s great power competition is unlike anything we have seen in the past because China is a competitor unlike any we have encountered.

　　Imperial powers of the past filled the world and pursued conquest for the sake of, among other things, scarce resources. Roman soldiers were stationed from Mesopotamia to the Hibernian border, sending 100,000 or more slaves a year back to Rome. The “far-flung battle line” of the British Empire included large parts of Asia and Africa. Britain financed its trade deficit during most of the nineteenth century by growing opium in India and selling it to China. The empires of Spain and Portugal extracted bullion from the New World and spent most of it on luxury imports from China—this bullion in turn paid for China’s nineteenth-century opium imports. The French and British fought their eighteenth-century wars over control of colonies, the slave trade, and the East Indian trade. Even the world wars of the twentieth century were fought because of territory. France in 1914 wanted the return of Alsace and Lorraine; Serbia wanted Bosnia-Herzegovina. The frontier of German expansion into Slavic lands defined the conflict between Moscow, Vienna, and Berlin. Hitler, for his part, demanded Lebensraum.

　　Today’s scarce resource is people—specifically working-age people who can be trained to work in a modern economy. Among today’s world powers, China is the only one that understands this and has taken measures to secure it.

　　Source: UN World Population Survey Multipolarity is a function of demographics. As the working-age population of the world shifts towards the Global South, its relative economic importance will rise. The working age population of high-income countries roughly doubled between 1950 and 2020, and has begun to fall; at constant fertility, it will fall by twenty percent by 2080. Among middle-income countries (the World Bank’s classification of one hundred and eight countries with a gross national income per capita of between $1,136 and $13,845), the growth of working-age populations has slowed, but will continue to grow through the remainder of the century. Demographics as such are not destiny, but they are the stuff of which destiny is made.

　　Aging populations and a shrinking workforce are the great challenge to the prosperity and stability of the industrial world, including China. Japan now has fifty dependent elderly for every one hundred workers; that is projected to rise to ninety by the end of the century. China’s ratio will rise from about twenty to seventy, the same level as Western Europe. The US ratio will rise from less than thirty to more than fifty.

　　Source: UN World Population Survey Without a revival of fertility, countries with declining populations have four choices: austerity with the attendant threat of social instability; immigration; rising productivity; and export of capital to employ workers in middle-income countries. China has embraced the latter two alternatives, with a single-minded program to adopt AI-driven productivity enhancements and the export of infrastructure and technology to middle-income countries of the Global South through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

　　China’s exports to the Global South have doubled since 2019, to Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia in particular. Exports to these countries now exceed China’s exports to all developed markets, although a large part of exports to the Global South are components to be assembled and re-exported to developed markets. Digital infrastructure is China’s flagship product. It lays a foundation for e-commerce, e-finance, digital currencies, digital tax payments, and other businesses that lock China’s customers into its technology.

　　Source: China Customs Bureau There is no indication that China is curious about how non-Chinese—that is, the barbarians—govern themselves. In a 2013 study for American Affairs, I compared China’s export growth by country to the Freedom House ranking for the same countries and found a correlation of close to zero. The United States spent six trillion dollars on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, with nothing to show for it. China spent two trillion on BRI and emerged as a world power.

　　China’s emergence as a world power bears little resemblance to that of the Soviet Union, which sought world hegemony by funding Communist Parties as well as terrorist groups in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Europe lived for two generations under the threat of Russian invasion. Nicaragua and Cuba fell to Russian subversion, and other countries, including Chile and Angola, came close. Russia supported North Vietnam in a prolonged proxy war with the United States and won. Apart from Russian occupation troops in Eastern Europe, the Soviets deployed nearly 25,000 military advisors to more than 30 countries.

　　Americans misunderstand China because we have never contended on the world stage with a civilization whose character and approach to conquest are so utterly alien.

　　China’s global footprint is quite different from imperial powers of the past. The United States has about 230,000 military personnel stationed overseas; China has just 200, at its sole overseas base in Djibouti. The United States has 177,000 active-duty Marines against China’s 30,000, and 70,000 Special Operations personnel against China’s estimated 12,000. Although China has spent lavishly to control its home theater with missiles, warplanes, submarines, and satellites, its global military footprint is effectively nonexistent, and its potential expeditionary forces are small.

　　What is more, there are no overseas Communist Parties on Beijing’s payroll, no Chinese advisors fighting wars of subversion—nothing but the usual influence-peddling and cultivation of compliant politicians. But China’s global influence is enormous and growing. It dominates several high-tech industries, most importantly telecommunications infrastructure, but also new-energy vehicles, solar panels, and nuclear energy. China’s image among developed countries is overwhelmingly negative; Pew Research reported in 2022 that 82 percent of Americans, 87 percent of Japanese, 74 percent of Germans, and 69 percent of Britons have a negative view of China. This picture, however, is reversed in the Global South where a large majority of Africans, Egyptians, Mexicans, Indonesians, and Argentines have a positive view of China. According to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 2024 survey, 50.5 percent of respondents from the ten ASEAN member countries would rather align with China than the United States, while 49.5 percent preferred the US.In 2023, 61.1 percent of respondents said they would choose the US.

　　With these numbers in mind, it is facile and inaccurate to dismiss China’s remarkable export success in the Global South as simple exploitation, as does Capt. Hendrix. He writes: “China has made deep investments through its ‘Belt and Road’ initiative into Africa. Many Africans have quickly discovered, however, that those investments overwhelmingly benefit China, which brings its own workforce and extracts resources while building little to no usable permanent infrastructure for the local citizenry.” Some may consider this exploitation, but a majority of Africans still have a positive view of China.

　　There are many instances of abuse and exploitation, to be sure, but China has also built digital and physical infrastructure that transform developing economies. Huawei alone reportedly built 70 percent of Africa’s 4G networks. Mobile broadband has moved tens of millions of people from the barter economy into the banking system and enabled entrepreneurs to run businesses on cheap smartphones. Once internet penetration reaches the 60 percent threshold, business formation in the Global South jumps.

　　I called this the “Sino-forming of the Global South” in my 2020 book, You Will Be Assimilated. This vast economic investment in the Global South has given China vast political influence. A telling example lies in the Persian Gulf.China now exports four times as much to Saudi Arabia and six times as much to the UAE as the United States. As the top trading partner with both the Gulf States and Iran, China mediated the restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March of 2023, a détente that remains in effect today.

　　Source: US and China Customs Americans misunderstand China because we have never contended on the world stage with a civilization whose character and approach to conquest are so utterly alien. China is not a nation but an artificial construct that still speaks in 200 dialects. The combined 8,000 miles of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers demanded a centralized state to manage flood control and irrigation, and this state required a centralized bureaucracy. Qin Shi Huang gave his name to China in the third century BCE and consolidated his rule with irrigation and canal construction that opened tens of thousands of square miles of land to farming. The Communist Party of China is the modern incarnation of the old Mandarin system, and the Belt and Road Initiative is a continuation of China’s ancient strategy of assimilation through infrastructure—except that much of the infrastructure today is digital. It is facile to argue that China is crisis prone. It has been crisis prone for its whole history. But today’s Chinese do not fear famine or catastrophic natural disasters for the first time in their 5,000-year history.

　　If China succeeds, or rather, continues to succeed, in assimilating the six billion people of the Global South into its economic sphere, it will be the world’s dominant power. It is well on its way. Today, China graduates more engineers and installs more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and it leads the world in factory automation, telecom infrastructure, nuclear and solar power, and new energy vehicles.

　　Despite China’s formidable advantages, the West has one decisive edge: our superior capacity to innovate, as I argued in a January essay for this publication. The scope for innovation in the application of Artificial Intelligence to urgent economic issues in the Global South is enormous, ranging from healthcare to agriculture and finance. Industrial applications of AI are in their infancy; China has an evident edge in industrial automation, but the collective talents and resources of the West could overcome this. The desultory attitude of the West toward the Global South has left the field open to China. I agree with Capt. Hendrix that America should summon a “broad alliance structure” of democracies. But this alliance must have a well-defined purpose in order to succeed; our “coalitions of the willing” to promote democracy through military force have been a failure.

　　This new alliance should have two objectives. The first is to marshal the West’s capacity for high-tech innovation, combining the resources of the United States, Western Europe, and the East Asian democracies, focusing on military as well as civilian technology. The second is to provide an alternative to Chinese infrastructure in the Global South. The combined resources and foreign assets of the United States, Germany, Japan, and South Korea are more than a match for China—if they are deployed intelligently.