Our picks: China syndromeU.S.-China Espionage Entanglements | Losing the Race’ For AI with China | War Games Fears, and more

A Brief History of U.S.-China Espionage Entanglements (Alexander Hol, MIT Technology Review)
Spies and blunders.

China’s War Games Raise Fears for Taiwan’s Security(Economist)
The island cannot rely on American help, but armed conflict remains unlikely.

Could China Successfully Blockade Taiwan?(James Holmes, National Interest)
History suggests how Taiwan’s defenders can overcome not just a blockade but an amphibious onslaught.

How Hollywood Should Deal with Chinese Censors(Economist)
Upholding freedom of speech means leaving the studios alone.

Big Tech Embraces New Cold War Nationalism(J. S. Tan, Foreign Policy)
China’s rise has pushed Silicon Valley away from the values it once claimed to hold.

Stay Calm About China(Anatol Lieven, Foreign Policy)
A central distinction in realist international relations thought is that between vital and secondary national interests. Vital interests are threats to a state’s survival, and can take the form either of conquest and subjugation from outside, or the promotion of internal subversion aimed at destroying the existing political and ideological order—the strategy followed by the Soviet Union across much of the world during the Cold War, and by the United States against the Soviet Union and allied regimes.
Rivalry between the United States and China is not a battle to the death of this kind, and it is very important that the United States not see it as such.
U.S. competition with China is real, serious, and bound to increase. That is inevitable, both for economic reasons and because of the incompatibility between Chinese ambitions and the U.S. establishment’s determination to maintain U.S. global leadership. However, it is not an existential struggle between two fundamentally opposed systems, nor is it a universal struggle that must be fought in every corner of the world.
U.S. geopolitical competition with China should therefore be handled by the United States on a pragmatic and case-by-case basis, and combined with continued cooperation with China on other critically important issues, such as climate change and disease control. Washington must be careful not to be drawn into local conflicts in which the U.S. has no national interest, and where the rights and wrongs are uncertain and the dangers of escalation very great: the Sino-Indian border dispute, for example.
Above all, as Stephen Walt has written in Foreign Policy, conceptualizing the competition with China in terms of an existential ideological conflict will both distort U.S. strategy and make the competition vastly more dangerous.