{"id":3917,"date":"2018-09-05T14:49:27","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T20:49:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wacaustin.org\/?p=3917"},"modified":"2018-09-07T15:04:12","modified_gmt":"2018-09-07T21:04:12","slug":"while-we-were-tweeting-the-future-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wacaustin.org\/wp2015\/while-we-were-tweeting-the-future-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"While We were Tweeting, the Future Happened"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Firestein, the executive director of the University of Texas\u2019 new China Public Policy Center headlined a recent session of our speaker series,\u00a0The World Spins,\u00a0<\/em>with some advice about competing with China.<\/p>\n

By Raye Elizabeth Ward<\/p>\n

\"David<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the end, we\u2019re going to have to step up and compete.\u00a0 China is not our enemy. But it is our most formidable national competitor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Firestein, an Austin native who\u00a0spent 20 years in China with the State Department and\u00a0another 10 as a senior vice president at the East-West Institute, has no illusions about what\u2019s at stake.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a cage match in wrestling,\u201d he explained, where one wrestler, the United States, follows the rules, and the other, China, uses any- and everything to win. And winning means becoming\u00a0the first country in history to be a brutally market-oriented authoritarian dictatorship.<\/p>\n

In a cage match, tweets and tariffs are a poor match against a singularly focused industrial policy and a bill of rights that says:\u00a0 Citizen, you stay out of politics, and we, the government, will make you rich.<\/p>\n

One battleground:\u00a0 artificial intelligence and big data<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not reading Jeff Ding\u2019s\u00a0ChinaAI Newsletter<\/em>,\u00a0you should be<\/a>.\u00a0Ding, who is a graduate student at Cambridge, shares translations of Chinese policy, strategy and technology. His most recent is a report from boutique private investment firm Rising Investments on\u00a0China\u2019s Civil-Military Fusion.<\/a>\u00a0 The report notes that although applications based on artificial intelligence (big data, internet) need time to developed.<\/p>\n