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Opinion
US-China rivalry is moving beyond guns and growth
In this new era of entangled competition, humans aren’t the only ones shaping state power; technological and material systems also produce geopolitical outcomes
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Li Xing is a Yunshan leading scholar and a distinguished professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, and an adjunct professor of international relations at Aalborg University, Denmark.
The US-China rivalry has long been cast as a contest between two superpowers, with one rising and the other defending its primacy. This competition has been largely measured in GDP growth, military spending and the number of aircraft carriers and alliances each side could marshal. The central criteria is “who holds power” or “who has more power”.
Yet today, the rivalry can no longer be understood by these conventional metrics. Rather, it is taking place within a complex web of technology, infrastructure and environmental systems that both sides are trying to control. In this new era of entangled competition, humans aren’t the only ones making things happen; technological and material systems produce geopolitical outcomes and shape state power.
Traditional thinking in international relations assumes that states and elites drive history. Realists measure power in weapons and resources; liberals do so in institutions and cooperation. Both see physical matter – resources, technology and the environment – as passive settings for human ambition, but that view is outdated. The infrastructure and technologies people build are beginning to reflect back on us, shaping decisions, alliances and vulnerabilities in ways no strategist fully intended.
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