The Digital Power Paradox: U.S.-China Competition, Semiconductors, and Weaponized Interdependence

This chapter seeks to unpack the intersections between state, commerce, and security via an analysis of the emerging strategic-technological competition between the United States and China. As the 2010s revealed, there is an exceptional yet perturbing convergence in the longer-term fundamental drivers and the short-term recurring ones at the core of bilateral relations. In the technology realm, great power competition between the United States and China is heading toward an increasingly disruptive state of technological decoupling with implications for greater global supply chain fragmentation and volatility. In unpacking this phenomenon, this chapter examines China’s military-civil fusion and its employment of national policies such as Made in China 2025 to achieve its technological ambitions. It then looks at America’s response, but also its networked ability to disrupt these ambitions and drive a greater bifurcation between China and the West. Overall, the chapter will argue that the intersections of commerce, the state, and power are not just based on economic incentives, but pertain more so to the great power political battle over who will control the technological strategic space, and thereby, the foothold that can be applied toward future strategic purposes.