All states have a plan but it is not always clear who's making them
Keith Lamb

Editor's note: Keith Lamb is a University of Oxford graduate with an MSc degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies. His primary research interests are international relations of China and China's "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics." The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

China's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) is coming up and like the current 13th Five-Year Plan, it is set to focus heavily on technology. For example, China's State Council announced on October 22 that quantum technology will feature prominently.

The U.S. administration has ceaselessly criticized China as a technological copier. As such, one might surmise that Chinese innovation would be gratifying to U.S. corporate and political elites.

In fact, according to a report "Worldwide Threat Assessment" published in 2019 by U.S. National Intelligence, China's technological innovation and that coming from the rest of the world too is regarded as a threat to the United States.

Presumably what the U.S. desires is a subservient state that doesn't copy or innovate. The report explains that "advances in quantum computing foreshadow challenges to current methods of protecting data and transactions."

Quantum computing, while it has many civil applications, could alter battlefield outcomes. Long distance communication via entanglement could break current RSA encryption, making it difficult for the U.S. to maintain its current level of surveillance. Quantum radar could compromise U.S. stealth technology.

These are only speculation, of course, but with the U.S. power base being so utterly entangled with approximately 800 military bases in 80 countries, others developing technology, which might alter battlefield outcomes, is a major cause for concern.

Not only does the U.S. not care for China developing homegrown technology, neither does it approve China's political-economic system which its five-year plans and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are part of.

The U.S. corporate mainstream media has already rallied to criticize the inequity of China's five-year plans complaining that sectors included in the plan see a 30 percent rise, relative to non-treated sectors, while in the U.S. employment in those sectors drops by 5 percent.

Of course, China's ability to direct its economy through its SOEs is also seen as unethical to free market competition. The U.S. believes that subsidies to SOEs are unfair to private industry.

However, for those who grew up during the Reagan-Thatcherite neo-liberal revolution, state-owned industries, as we were told, are inefficient and unable to innovate. While we were shown long lines of citizens, from the Soviet Union, queuing up for potatoes, five-year plans implemented by socialist states were sniggered at.

As such, in the name of "innovation and efficiency," in the UK's case, Thatcher's revolution led to selling off the UK's state industries for pennies on the pound to transnational capital.

This looting of public assets was as Miller and Dinan lucidly describe in their book "A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power" was done through transnational capital funding Britain's Conservative Party in league with their PR industries which launched a campaign to persuade the British public to support the theft.

Young female using touch screen on the street in Shanghai, China. /Getty Images

Young female using touch screen on the street in Shanghai, China. /Getty Images

These same neo-liberal forces, who are primarily transatlantic Western ruling elite, also campaigned to have manufacturing moved to China to increase profit margins. Ironically, this movement of industry was to thwart democratic socialist forces at home that represented the Western proletariat.

China simply can't do anything right. When China was producing low grade goods, it was "stealing" jobs and technology from the West. This was despite neoliberal forces themselves are moving production to China.

Now that China creates its own technology and with ever-increasing push for reliance on its internal market, due to U.S. campaigning to move industry home, China is still portrayed as a "stealer" of jobs from the U.S. high-tech sector.

In fact, while externally the U.S. appears to have no long-term five-year plans and no state industries, in a sense, they do. It's just that the relationship is the reversal of cause and effect.

Large corporations have captured the U.S. and many of its Western allies, which is the inverse of the state-corporate relationship in China. As such, it is they who make the plan. The aforementioned neoliberal privatizations and the moving of industry prominently support this relationship.

Robert Monks, the founder of Lens Governance Advisors, writes on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance that:

"The financial power of American corporations now controls every stage of politics – legislative, executive, and ultimately judicial… Capture has been further implemented through the extensive lobbying power of corporations…[and] has been perpetuated through the removal of property 'offshore', where it is neither regulated nor taxed." 

In terms of technology, U.S. political activist Noam Chomsky has waxed lyrical about computing being developed by the taxpayers' purse through university research. Early computing research, which was not profitable, was then handed over to private capital to profit from.

More recently Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, claimed he was ousted in the 2019 coup by the U.S., in order to secure Bolivia's mammoth lithium reserves, needed for batteries. Elon Musk, the head of Tesla cars powered by lithium batteries, when discussing the subjected, callously tweeted, "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."

The fact is when it comes to the state and planning whether that be a socialist state or a capitalist one, planning is ubiquitous. The differences are who makes the plan and whether that plan is widely publicized.

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