General Secretary Xi Jinping’s exhortation to “turn danger into opportunity” in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic energized construction of New Type Infrastructure by leveraging the pandemic-driven shift to 5G business and industrial platforms.
Dorman, David, “Making the Most of It, Party II: Xi Jinping Leverages Coronavirus ‘War Without Smoke” to Spur Digital Transformation, Test National Defense Mobilization,” Security Nexus, April 27, 2020
Chinese military commentators found Xi’s “dialectic logic” on “danger and opportunity” an apt template for grading the performance of the PLA during the early stages of the epidemic. One academic at the PLA National Defense University College of National Security Studies offered that the insights gained from the PLA’s participation in epidemic prevention and control could be used to improve its ability to win future informatized local wars, a view repeated by other experts in the Chinese military. Mirroring Xi Jinping’s broader guidance to the Party, the same academic argued that the circumstances surrounding the epidemic are relevant to conditions China’s military could face in future informatized local wars: sudden outbreak and rapid escalation, individual actions generating wide and unexpected outcomes, and the necessity to rapidly take the strategic initiative to turn the situation in your favor.
Military and civilian commentators alike highlighted that conditions like these pointed to the importance of a comprehensive digital economy and infrastructure, 5G-driven online platforms and ecosystems, and the high-technology innovation need to support both. This was not new language, much of it based on guidance from Xi Jinping years before. However, now it was repackaged to highlight a Communist Party that had seen and reacted quickly to global business opportunities opened by the pandemic, not anything like the Party that slept through the viral outbreak. Military commentators also jumped on the “opportunity” to highlight epidemic-driven insights. In addition to the continued importance of military civilian fusion, experts pointed to the epidemic-driven recommendation that ongoing PLA high technology programs like digitalization and intelligentization must continue.