Silly People vs. Serious People

Writing last week in the Wall Street Journal, William Galston, a former senior policy advisor to President Clinton, enumerated five broad pillars of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s strategy for world dominance.

One of those is technology. Xi’s “Made in China 2025” seeks to secure China’s lead in the “technologies that will dominate the global market in coming decades, many of which have military applications.” Another pillar of Mr. Xi’s strategy is military. China possesses the largest navy in the world, and is busy establishing a “global system of ports to give its forces access all over the world.” And its land forces are far better equipped than they were a decade ago.

President Joe Biden appears to recognize the threat, and spent a great deal of his time on his recent European trip marshalling support for confronting China.

Yet in that confrontation, the United States is seriously handicapping itself: As one comedian put it recently, it is a confrontation between a serious people (China) and a silly people (the United States). China, he said, builds major dams in the time we spend arguing over what to name them. In the time China has taken to build 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, the state of California has not quite managed to connect Bakersfield and Merced, the raisin capital of the world, despite spending $6 billion to do so. In 2019, the United States issued more degrees in visual and performing arts than in computers, information science, and math.