Benjamin Y. Fong at Phenomenal World:
Many political commentators and scholars have found it useful to frame China’s challenge to US hegemony in the terms of a “second Cold War”—second, of course, to the first between the US and the USSR. In addition to a fight for political influence in various geographic blocs of countries, the second Cold War is also a form of “network-based competition,” in which the US and China compete for dominance over “interrelated transactional networks.” If the dollar’s role was one important element in the history of the first Cold War, another particularly important transaction network today is e-commerce, which spans infrastructural, logistical, and digital domains. Both countries have domestic e-commerce giants—Amazon and Alibaba—which, in the opinion of some observers, “Washington and Beijing have sought to instrumentalize… in pursuit of geoeconomic and geopolitical objectives.”
If indeed e-commerce is a battlefield in a new Cold War, then China has thus far put up a weak fight.
More here.