BY ADAM NI
Xi Jinping's China seems destined to challenge US technological supremacy in key fields such as AI, supercomputing and quantum information science
(Reuters) China unveiled its largest rise in defense spending in three years on Monday, setting an 8.1 percent growth target compared to 2017, fuelling the country’s ambitious military modernization program amid rising Chinese security concerns.
We shouldn’t take too much comfort, though, if China is indeed bumping up against its limits. You might suppose a state undergoing demographic or economic decline would conduct its affairs with caution in order to husband increasingly scarce resources. And you would be right: that does make sense. But my finding from the population-decline study—drawing on demographic catastrophes in classical Greece—was that demographic stresses may have just the opposite effect. A contender could run even more risks than it normally would despite its loss of manpower and other resources.