Glimpsing China's quantum grand strategy

Beware the stealthy invasion by Beijing's "little blue men"

Jim/Sara Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

It all starts with very different philosophies regarding tactics and targets:

• America brings the gun and looks for the gunman. We believe that if we take out the bad actors, we secure the environment from the top-down. Our approach leads with military and views defense as a zero-sum game (the more you have, the less I have).

• China brings the sensors and looks for the troublemaker well left of “boom.” It believes that if they locate likely bad actors before they get their act together, they create a secure environment from the bottom-up — Terminator-like (the best solution being the one maximally left of “boom”: aborting the rebel leader thus never born — see Xinjiang and the Uyghurs for details). They lead with police and view security as a non-zero sum game (the more we both have, the better, but I retain top-dog control and have unfettered access to your environment).

  Per my recent and newer slide, it’s all first about gaining access to the preeminent data fusion point today — the smartphone.

© Thomas P.M. Barnett/Throughline Inc.

Once inside the gate, you have access to all manner of big-data pools: how they identify, whom they relate to and communicate with, how they transact, how they consumer media, and ultimately how all that is expressed as a world-facing viewpoint or political identity. By sucking up big data at each level, the authorities’ ability to feed AI prediction machinery means they can anticipate throughout: reinforcing the target’s political world-view with echo-chamber media flows, steering their transactions to your participating vendors, policing their personal ties with omniveillance machinery that interprets your definitions of good-v-bad behavior (China’s still rudimental social credit system/score), and — through all that — effecting securing their identity within a Matrix of your construction.