CHINA
22 May 2025
The Wires of War – Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
A cyberwar is at the heart of the great power struggle between the US and China, writes John West, Executive Director, Asian Century Institute.
China has been in a cyberwar, a “grey war”, with the US for several years now, wrote Jacob Helberg in his book, The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power, published in 2021. For many, this came as a surprise. During the decade of the 2000s, American and other Western policy makers imagined that the Internet and international trade would foster political openness and ultimately democracy in authoritarian states like China and Russia.
Misinformation and disinformation have always been features of international and relations. But these authoritarian regimes also buckled down on efforts to destabilise the US and other democracies by propaganda disseminated through social and other media. The very ideas of democracy and freedom are seen as threats to the stability of authoritarian regimes. China is keen to create a world that is safe for the Chinese Communist Party. It is of course deeply ironic that some authoritarian governments are using US technology to defend and export autocracy around the world.
Helberg insists that the competition between China and the US is not just about GDP. China’s total GDP is ahead of America’s in purchasing power terms, but behind on market prices. It’s also a competition about ideas and the US has the better ideas about democracy and individual liberty, which are universal ideas and have been adopted in Japan, Korea, Australia and elsewhere.
He argues that the US should be confident and not be intimidated by Chinese propaganda. In reality, the US arguably seems to be deep into a crisis of confidence, as I write. And while the outcome of the current titanic battle over tariffs and trade is unclear, it is virtually impossible to imagine a scenario of peaceful relations. The grey war will continue.
Helberg distinguishes between the “front end” and the “back end” of the grey war. The front end refers to information operations through applications, news information, and social media platforms. The grey war became very prominent with Russia’s interference during the 2016 US presidential elections. Since then China, Iran and Saudi Arabia have all become major players in that space. In particular, China now leads the way as state-sponsored news outlets push very aggressively narratives to discredit democracy and the US government.
The back end of the grey war refers to the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Helberg argues that if you control the Internet’s hardware – cellular phones, satellites, fiber-optic cables, 5G networks, wires, and antennas – you can have access to everything that runs through the hardware. And in this space, there are only two countries – the US and China – which have the hardware companies and expertise to be major players.
In the early 2010s, KPN, a Dutch telecommunications company, ran an analysis of Huawei equipment and came to the overwhelming conclusion that Huawei had access to everything that ran across its network – including the cell phone numbers of people making calls, even conversations of members of the Dutch government. Although this study remained confidential for about a decade, it only confirmed what the US intelligence community was saying for several years – namely that these Chinese companies pose a very real national security danger.
The Chinese government also requires Chinese Internet companies to do things like censoring Winnie the Pooh (who resembles Chinese leader Xi Jinping!) or maps showing Taiwan as an independent territory or content that paints democracy in a flattering light.
China has over between two and three million employees, known as the 50 Cent Party, whose job is to monitor and censor the Chinese online information environment. This obviously poses an enormous risk for the personal privacy, civil liberties and protection of intellectual property of citizens and companies from America and other democracies.
According to Helberg, China is creating a “techno-block” with countries (especially in Africa) to which it is supplying back-end information infrastructure, and also to which it is exporting closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance technology for monitoring and controlling their societies. China’s authoritarian Internet model is part of its strategy to promote autocracy around the world with the ultimate objective of making the world safer for the Chinese Communist Party.
Today, it is no longer an issue of whether the Internet is open or closed. It is more about whether the Internet democratic or authoritarian. The Internet is starting to look more like the physical world. Germany now has a hate speech law. California passed a privacy law. Thus, the Internet is not totally lawless or ungoverned in the West. But its rules are determined democratically – in contrast to China where Internet governance is determined by the Communist Party, with no rule of law or accountability.
All things considered, the US government does not have the nation's tech industry at its beck and call like China does, but it does have the advantage of an open, more innovative system – one example being Elon Musk’s Starlink. But the current government’s anti-migration narrative will undermine Silicon Valley, whose innovation has depended greatly on US-educated migrants. And companies like Huawei and ZTE benefit from virtually unlimited showers of government subsidies.
Helberg is particularly concerned that deindustrialisation and outsourcing of tech production to China have left the US strategically vulnerable. Reliance on Chinese production of hardware can engender the risk of “back-doors” being put into equipment. The coronavirus highlighted the risk of being vulnerable to coercion. Reshoring all of outsourced manufacturing is not feasible. But some reshoring of products which are critical to national security, along with “friend-shoring” of some production to close and trusted allies, as the government is promoting, is important. In this new gray war a deindustrialized US can be a disarmed US.
Silicon Valley was born from contracts and close cooperation with the US government. Prior to that, leading US companies like General Motors got behind the World War 2 effort against Japan and Germany. Unfortunately the US has suffered in recent years from a rift between Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley.
Part of the problem is the immense size of American tech companies which enables them to do their thing. They sometimes act as quasi-sovereigns, having their own foreign policies and negotiating directly with foreign governments. This is one of the reasons why there have been calls to break up some of these companies.
Other factors are generational and cultural. The average age of an employee at Google and Apple is in the early 30s, whereas the average age of Senators is 63. These people came of age at very different times, have had very different life experiences, and view technology very differently.
Most young people from Silicon Valley see a borderless place, while policymakers don't always view it that way. The Valley is a very horizontal, unstructured place with a culture of moving much faster than Washington with its more hierarchical structures and systems. And some companies feel no shame in exporting their technologies to authoritarian regimes.
Nevertheless, both communities have a vested interest in cooperation. Finding a better way to work together on national security is incredibly important for the future of the country. Technology isn't the solution to all of our problems but it is a key component.
And then at the age of just 35, Helberg was appointed Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment by President Trump. Helberg was one of the top donors to Donald Trump's 2024 reelection campaign, having previously donated to Democratic candidates. He reportedly attributes his political shift to the COVID-19 pandemic, technological concerns about China, and anti-Israel views among Democrats.
Trigger for Grey War
The Arab Spring was a super-wakeup call for these authoritarian states. They saw Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square who were organising their protests and communicating to the world using social media. So authoritarian states began working hard to use the Internet and other technologies as vehicles for social and political control at home, such as for China’s Uyghur population. They were also centralising their political control over the Internet such as through China’s Great Firewall and its banning US tech companies like Google and Facebook from the Chinese market.Misinformation and disinformation have always been features of international and relations. But these authoritarian regimes also buckled down on efforts to destabilise the US and other democracies by propaganda disseminated through social and other media. The very ideas of democracy and freedom are seen as threats to the stability of authoritarian regimes. China is keen to create a world that is safe for the Chinese Communist Party. It is of course deeply ironic that some authoritarian governments are using US technology to defend and export autocracy around the world.
China’s anti-US narrative
In his insightful book, Helberg argues that China’s narrative promoted through the grey war is that it is on an unstoppable path to overtaking the US. China is trying to demoralise the US and the West. The Chinese want the US to believe it is in irreversible decline, and the US should not even try to contain China. It should just accommodate China.Helberg insists that the competition between China and the US is not just about GDP. China’s total GDP is ahead of America’s in purchasing power terms, but behind on market prices. It’s also a competition about ideas and the US has the better ideas about democracy and individual liberty, which are universal ideas and have been adopted in Japan, Korea, Australia and elsewhere.
He argues that the US should be confident and not be intimidated by Chinese propaganda. In reality, the US arguably seems to be deep into a crisis of confidence, as I write. And while the outcome of the current titanic battle over tariffs and trade is unclear, it is virtually impossible to imagine a scenario of peaceful relations. The grey war will continue.
What is the grey war?
Helberg’s notion of a grey war is important. It is obviously between black and white. We should not think of war and peace in binary terms, but along a spectrum where there are degrees of war and peace. The grey war is also fundamentally different from the Cold War in that there are deep economic, technological and person-to-person connections between the US and China, which was not the case between the US and the Soviet Union.Helberg distinguishes between the “front end” and the “back end” of the grey war. The front end refers to information operations through applications, news information, and social media platforms. The grey war became very prominent with Russia’s interference during the 2016 US presidential elections. Since then China, Iran and Saudi Arabia have all become major players in that space. In particular, China now leads the way as state-sponsored news outlets push very aggressively narratives to discredit democracy and the US government.
The back end of the grey war refers to the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Helberg argues that if you control the Internet’s hardware – cellular phones, satellites, fiber-optic cables, 5G networks, wires, and antennas – you can have access to everything that runs through the hardware. And in this space, there are only two countries – the US and China – which have the hardware companies and expertise to be major players.
In the early 2010s, KPN, a Dutch telecommunications company, ran an analysis of Huawei equipment and came to the overwhelming conclusion that Huawei had access to everything that ran across its network – including the cell phone numbers of people making calls, even conversations of members of the Dutch government. Although this study remained confidential for about a decade, it only confirmed what the US intelligence community was saying for several years – namely that these Chinese companies pose a very real national security danger.
China’s civil/military fusion
What is unique about China is its civil/military doctrine, according to Helberg, that basically fuses its private companies with the government. This means that Huawei and ZTE make back-end information infrastructure which can be used as instruments of the Chinese state. The fact that these seemingly efficient companies live off massive subsidies gives the Chinese government enormous leverage over them.The Chinese government also requires Chinese Internet companies to do things like censoring Winnie the Pooh (who resembles Chinese leader Xi Jinping!) or maps showing Taiwan as an independent territory or content that paints democracy in a flattering light.
China has over between two and three million employees, known as the 50 Cent Party, whose job is to monitor and censor the Chinese online information environment. This obviously poses an enormous risk for the personal privacy, civil liberties and protection of intellectual property of citizens and companies from America and other democracies.
According to Helberg, China is creating a “techno-block” with countries (especially in Africa) to which it is supplying back-end information infrastructure, and also to which it is exporting closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance technology for monitoring and controlling their societies. China’s authoritarian Internet model is part of its strategy to promote autocracy around the world with the ultimate objective of making the world safer for the Chinese Communist Party.
US decentralised Internet environment
In sharp contrast to China, the US Internet environment is mostly decentralized with no control. People can basically say whatever they want online, unless it’s illegal. In China, there is a very different paradigm where the government has passed very strict content moderation rules.Today, it is no longer an issue of whether the Internet is open or closed. It is more about whether the Internet democratic or authoritarian. The Internet is starting to look more like the physical world. Germany now has a hate speech law. California passed a privacy law. Thus, the Internet is not totally lawless or ungoverned in the West. But its rules are determined democratically – in contrast to China where Internet governance is determined by the Communist Party, with no rule of law or accountability.
All things considered, the US government does not have the nation's tech industry at its beck and call like China does, but it does have the advantage of an open, more innovative system – one example being Elon Musk’s Starlink. But the current government’s anti-migration narrative will undermine Silicon Valley, whose innovation has depended greatly on US-educated migrants. And companies like Huawei and ZTE benefit from virtually unlimited showers of government subsidies.
Helberg is particularly concerned that deindustrialisation and outsourcing of tech production to China have left the US strategically vulnerable. Reliance on Chinese production of hardware can engender the risk of “back-doors” being put into equipment. The coronavirus highlighted the risk of being vulnerable to coercion. Reshoring all of outsourced manufacturing is not feasible. But some reshoring of products which are critical to national security, along with “friend-shoring” of some production to close and trusted allies, as the government is promoting, is important. In this new gray war a deindustrialized US can be a disarmed US.
Rift between Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley
One of Helberg’s most important points is his insistence that America’s tech and policy-making communities should work much more collaboratively to address the important challenges of technological competition with China. To this end, he is one of the co-founders of the Hill & Valley Forum, a consortium of American lawmakers and venture capitalists first convened in March 2023 to combat China's influence on the US technology industry.Silicon Valley was born from contracts and close cooperation with the US government. Prior to that, leading US companies like General Motors got behind the World War 2 effort against Japan and Germany. Unfortunately the US has suffered in recent years from a rift between Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley.
Part of the problem is the immense size of American tech companies which enables them to do their thing. They sometimes act as quasi-sovereigns, having their own foreign policies and negotiating directly with foreign governments. This is one of the reasons why there have been calls to break up some of these companies.
Other factors are generational and cultural. The average age of an employee at Google and Apple is in the early 30s, whereas the average age of Senators is 63. These people came of age at very different times, have had very different life experiences, and view technology very differently.
Most young people from Silicon Valley see a borderless place, while policymakers don't always view it that way. The Valley is a very horizontal, unstructured place with a culture of moving much faster than Washington with its more hierarchical structures and systems. And some companies feel no shame in exporting their technologies to authoritarian regimes.
Nevertheless, both communities have a vested interest in cooperation. Finding a better way to work together on national security is incredibly important for the future of the country. Technology isn't the solution to all of our problems but it is a key component.
Conclusion
This tech-fueled political warfare will shape the world’s balance of power for the coming century as autocracies exploit 21st-century methods to redivide the world into 20th-century-style spheres of influence. According to Helberg, if Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill can work closely together to protect democracy from autocratic sabotage emanating from Beijing to Moscow and Tehran, this would greatly enhance America’s position in the global struggle for power.Jacob Helberg – author of The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
Helberg is a remarkable individual. He wrote this book drawing on his experience as Google’s global internal product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference from 2016 to 2020 – as well as his affiliations with Stanford University, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Brookings Institution.And then at the age of just 35, Helberg was appointed Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment by President Trump. Helberg was one of the top donors to Donald Trump's 2024 reelection campaign, having previously donated to Democratic candidates. He reportedly attributes his political shift to the COVID-19 pandemic, technological concerns about China, and anti-Israel views among Democrats.