A BBC drama that debuted this week has a terrifying final five minutes. President Donald Trump, in his last days in office, launches a nuclear strike against an artificial Pacific Ocean island built by the Chinese — this is supposed to be in 2024 as Trump’s second term is ending. The first episode of Years and Years ended with sirens wailing and riots. But the programme highlighted a new global reality: China is now viewed as the arch-enemy by the West in a face-off that’s about more than just trade.

It's an unpleasant reality that the BBC’s programme suddenly doesn’t seem far-fetched. On Wednesday, China’s President Xi Jinping made headlines when he forcefully rejected talk about a “clash of civilisations” and a US-China collision. Xi, speaking in Beijing, was taking aim at Kiron Skinner, a mid-rung State Department official who recently created waves by saying US-China confrontations were "a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology." Skinner was borrowing ideas put forward in a famous essay by Harvard academic Samuel Huntington, who argued future face-offs would be cultural between civilisations, not based on economics or ideology.

Ostensibly, Trump’s battle against the Chinese is about correcting trade imbalances built up over decades. In reality, it’s a fight for global dominance: a battle to be the unchallenged global superpower. The Americans aren't about to relinquish that position without a stiff challenge. The Chinese believe this is the Asian Century and it belongs to them. With an economy one-fifth the size of China, we don’t really figure in their calculations.

Military spending

And make no mistake. When it comes to military spending, there are only two superpowers: the US and China. The Americans are far out in front with an annual military spend of $649 billion, according to Sipri (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), up by 4.6 per cent from the previous year, and Trump’s promised defence spending will rise steeply.

By comparison, Sipri pegs China’s defence budget at $250 billion, up by 5 per cent from a year earlier. China’s hiked its defence budget for 24 years running and now spends 10 times as much as it did in 1994 but this only represents 1.9 per cent of its GDP as its economy’s boomed. Third is Saudi Arabia at $69 billion while India is in fourth place at $66.5 billion.

For nearly three decades, the Americans were confident that after seeing off the USSR, they were the only global superpower. Their dominance became complete with the rise of Silicon Valley’s technological stars. It’s only lately Chinese companies have emerged to challenge the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Crucially, China blocked US firms like Amazon and Google and that allowed them to build home-grown stars. They’ve also obliged joint venture companies to reveal key technology if they wanted access to their huge market that Chinese companies smartly used to create world-beating products.

Surprisingly, the Americans, absorbed as they were in Iraq and Afghanistan, were relatively laidback about China’s rise. The new realities were driven home to them when Xi flexed his muscles by building artificial islands in the Pacific and laying out his sweepingly ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. The Chinese have also made strong inroads into Africa and South East Asia.

Meanwhile, China is striding ahead in emerging technologies from e-buses and solar power to even drone technology. Chinese tech companies also began making their presences felt in Silicon Valley, buying stakes in small start-ups and investing in critical technologies like artificial intelligence.

In Silicon Valley, Chinese giant Baidu’s innovation centre is next door to Google while the US alleges China’s been stealing tech secrets in a big way.

Even before Trump, President Barack Obama began moving against China by strengthening CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. CFIUS has been taking an increasingly tough stand with the result Chinese investments in the US have virtually dried up. Just this week, Chinese mobile company Kunlun bowed to a CFIUS order to sell its shares in gay-dating site Grindr by June 2020, although the deal was already completed. The US is also hammering China by blocking American telecom companies from buying Huawei equipment. Action against ZTE may be on the cards too.

For now, the Chinese are still dependent on the US. Their Made-in-China programme, which targets extremely high self-sufficiency, is only slated to be in place by 2025 and that could be a stretch. Also, China’s government has spent heavily to keep the economy stable despite global pressures. So it could be argued this is the best time for the US to confront China.

Right now, the trade war is intensifying rather than heading to a patch-up. Even Jim O'Neill, the former Goldman Sachs’ chief economist who coined the terms BRIC, sounds gloomy. “Even if these trade tensions are solved for now, I think in the future there will be further escalations. I don’t think the US is going to willingly accept China becoming bigger than the US,” O'Neill opined this week. And that can only mean greater disruption and uncertainty in every corner of the globe.

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