| That's because it's a classic refrain that most commonly refers to international competition more often than domestic competition, due to the obvious broad implications to national security and defense. It's not in any way limited to or specific to China - and it's even occasionally used domestically in reference to tech companies battling (see: frequent arms race references in regards to Amazon vs Google vs Microsoft in cloud). The exact same language would be used if the US were competing against Russia on this, and previously was used when the USSR was the primary political competitor of the US. It has also been used to refer to competition with Japan, now and in the past. NYTimes, 2005, vs the Japanese (and recently ascendant China): "A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer performance, many times the speed of today's most powerful machines. And beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan, there is a new entrant -- China -- eager to showcase its arrival as an economic powerhouse." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/technology/a-new-arms-race... --- "A Global Arms Race to Create a Superintelligent AI is Looming" https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a-global-arms-rac... --- "Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Warn of Artificial Intelligence Arms Race" http://www.newsweek.com/ai-asilomar-principles-artificial-in... --- "How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-29/how-amazo... --- "Amazon and Google Continue Cloud Arms Race With New Data Centers" http://fortune.com/2016/09/30/amazon-google-add-data-centers... --- 2009: "Smartphone vs. feature phone arms race heats up" http://www.zdnet.com/article/smartphone-vs-feature-phone-arm... --- "The Adultery Arms Race" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/the-adu... |