The entire premise of the Trump administration's hardline stance - that China is so badly dependent on US markets and high technology that cutting these off would be a death blow to its economic and geopolitical ambitions - rings increasingly hollow. The fact is, China never really needed the US and its allies nearly as much as they imagined. On top of this, it has offered them enormous benefits in return, as well - the loss of which will be considerably greater for the free world than will be the closure to Beijing of Western institutions and know-how, both of which are now enormously exaggerated in their intrinsic and practical value.
China already faces a very different challenge in its ongoing national development than it did even a decade and a half ago, as it first surged into global economic powerhouse status aback entry into the WTO and the free trade this offered its vast export engine of cheap labor and intensive capital investment. This phase of growth is over, and China's rulers already plan to slow down, even to potentially a crawl, future growth for the sake of internal socioeconomic rebalancing and redistribution.
It is no longer correct to assume, as Western media and punditry so blithely do, that Beijing's obsession remains to "overtake the US" in the conventional sense of creating more cutting-edge technology and eventually catching up to the same high average living standards; the former remains a long-term aspiration, the latter is already being reassessed as a legitimate goal at all. Some 40 years of reform and opening have already entrenched within the People's Republic the same structural social and cultural problems that plague far wealthier Western states - destabilization of the traditional family, plunging birthrates, exploding frequencies of sexual and other moral vices and addictions, epidemic rates of psychological disorders such as depression, and an especially fragile and vulnerable youth population in which these complications of postmodernity are amplified. These issues of the public welfare reaching down to the very private individual level - not some rat race for superpower supremacy with America - are what keep the country's Communist rulers up at night.
The question confronting China is no longer one of generating prosperity, but one of how to harness it for a well-rounded and holistic well-being for its venerable Oriental society and culture in the collective. To this end, all Western-inspired ideas and Western-sourced technical innovations are merely ancillary to the perceived needs of the Chinese state in its self-declared service of the Chinese people. What Beijing wants far more than parity with the West is a better-functioning and more harmonious domestic house - whereby even autocratic one-party rule itself is but a means to an end, not the end in itself.
This requires, in turn, trade-offs that point not necessarily to acceleration of capital and technological accumulation, but more selective distribution and application of it. The human factor is central: China has never lionized technology as some silver bullet to supplant human decision-making and agency, even in limited well-defined realms; it instead views it only through the lens of optimizing, streamlining, and securing and certifying the functions of governance and oversight that are so central to any nation or society's ongoing existence across all ages and eras. Likewise, and even more critically, China has never prized material wealth as anything intrinsically so valuable that it can purport to replace - rather than facilitate with more leisure and luxury time - the more transcendental pursuit of human knowledge and wisdom at a broad and general level if at all possible. Wealth and technology alike, as China has recently been rediscovering in its struggle to wean itself off the broken rapid-growth model of recent decades, are of little value if they don't somehow engender deeper integration, based on enhanced overall self-awareness and other-awareness, of the individual members and groupings of society which form it as a whole.
Beijing thus has, by this point, little confusion as to where its principal chores lie in the foreseeable future - and how a partial retrenchment from engagement abroad, especially with the democratic West and the US in particular, would actually help rather than hurt this endeavor. Practically no expert opinion on the other end - the instigating end - of the trade war has even thought about this possibility, judging from the commentary to date.
The role that technology will play for China is not to increase the average citizen's enjoyment and consumption of goods and services - of that there is already an excess, in the ruling bureaucracy's view - but to gradually educate and inculcate said citizenry in the traditionally specialized domains of knowledge and application of it hitherto reserved for the mandarin caste. This cannot happen overnight in any individual Chinese person's case: it must be fully and deeply integrated into all aspects of everyday life over a period of many years. Consumption of sheer quantity - even superlative quality, in many cases - of goods and services will be de-emphasized; production of them with greater efficiency and more widely disseminated specialist knowledge, such as computer coding, with greater mass involvement to boot, will be promoted.
As such, the vision of a future high-tech China will not be one in which disjointed individual consumers are instantly downloading and processing with lightning speeds ever-greater volumes of raw data in every conceivable media format; it will be one in which connected clusters of citizens will be very deliberately collaborating in controlled and measured formulations of moderate scale and speed - with the only end-goal being the absorption into the strictly human realm of knowledge and understanding of digitally-mediated data points, which by definition can only happen not by being force-fed, but by an osmotic-diffusive digestion.
Contrast this with what the vaunted tech titans of Silicon Valley have created for Western society: an anarchic mass jumble of cacophonous competing hashtags and memes - expressing itself most effectively in collective format by the naked tribalistic insults, recriminations, and backbiting which are already becoming the legacy and hallmark of unregulated social media. Is that something that Western elites and opinion leaders - no less its rabid tribal elders like Donald Trump himself - can even presume to be a model or inspiration for the proud Middle Kingdom, which now has every reason to decouple from Western technological systems and networks altogether?
You can see where this must conclude: China's already won the trade war because it alone - in stark contrast to the clueless West and especially self-absorbed ethnocentric United States - even understands what this conflict is really all about. It's hard to win a war when you don't even know what your objectives are - versus what mirages you think they are. In the end, you can't prevail in a new century's competition if you stick to the script of the last century - and this is what the last-ditch American attempt to stop China's rise with this trade war essentially and very transparently has now been disclosed to be.
