This book raises a worthwhile topic, and the author is pretty well positioned in the field, but has enough problems as a book (and in the general arguments he makes) to only be 4/5. It's essentially an argument that China is engaged in a lot of bad practices and is a long-term strategic rival to the US (and the West generally), and that immediate action by the US is needed ("in the next 3 years") to prevent Chinese domination of the world. Nothing really new, but the state-owned corporations, use of compelled IP transfer to Chinese partners, overseas Chinese used as agents, non-reciprocal access to China, counterfeit goods, hacking, etc. He mostly focused on commercial vs. intelligence or military challenges, and points out that Wall Street and US corporations are collaborators with the Chinese government in doing a lot of this.

The ultimate irony here is that almost everything the author accuses China of are also things the US Government has done at various points (and the author shows examples of when we basically did this to USSR, specifically using supply chain and financial-infrastructure attacks to wreck USSR trans-Siberian pipeline projects in the early 1980s and manipulation of the price of oil (along with SDI and restricting access to global financial markets) to bankrupt the USSR and force the collapse.). Trying to keep China out of various critical sectors is the same thing as keeping the US or allies in, in places where access can be used for strategic advantage later -- keeping the world using US corporate controlled communications infrastructure is the most obvious. Yes, the rules the US has set up are more "fair" and reasonable in a lot of ways than what China would set up, but there are areas where it's pure US self-interest and not particularly ideals at play.

Gratingly, the audiobook has a bunch of areas where the narrator clearly doesn't understand the text. There are also a few places where it's unclear if the author or editors made mistakes -- referring to a generic thing like C4ISR capability as a specific system (rather than something a specific system would provide).

The worst part is the rant on 5G. I can't tell if the author misunderstands aspects of the technology and telecommunications infrastructure, if he was attempting to make it accessible to a broad audience and failed, or if there were just editing issues. I think the most likely explanation is that someone believes vendor hype rather than actual deployment reality. 5G isn't a completely unprecedented thing -- it is more akin to pervasive high-speed cellular data (on par with the change between EDGE/1xRTT and 3G/4G) and not a "new Internet". There are absolutely concerns with having network infrastructure controlled by a potentially unreliable or foreign-state-controlled vendor, but the same applies to existing cellphone networks, Internet routers today, CPE used in consumer ISP deployments, etc. The problem is critical infrastructure under control of a potentially hostile actor (directly or indirectly), not the characteristics of a specific network upgrade.

Overall, I like the book for raising the issue of how to deal with a long-term rival like China, but wish the book were better. ( )

Quick read that probably could have been condensed to 100 pages. Living in the US and experiencing its ineptitude in covid and BLM, I can’t fathom a coordinated response against china’s aggression. The US is also too blinded by market greed to change its ways. We’re pretty screwed. ( )