China plans to toss foreign-made PCs from government agencies 'in two years'

Authorities in China have reportedly directed government agencies and state-run companies to bin all personal computers made by foreign companies and replace them with homegrown hardware within two years. According to Bloomberg, "people familiar with the plan" recounted how government staff were told upon returning from China' …

[b0llchit]

... Even if they swap in domestic brands, there'll still be lots of US & Western tech inside.

But here is the trick... The "still be" will become gradually a smaller part each time China put its national foot down. It may not be today, but China is becoming less dependent on western technology. That is the strategy. It may take another 10 or 20 years to become self sufficient, but then you have to deal with a power that cannot be held down by "simple" trade sanctions.

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

What counts as foreign?

Is a Lenovo made in Indonesia foreign? Is a HP or Dell made in China foreign?

[b0llchit]

Re: What counts as foreign?

It is fully domestic when you control the entire supply-chain from raw materials to finished product. The branding on the box is meaningless. The supply-chain is the key.

[Cederic]

Re: What counts as foreign?

I think when it comes to complex electronics you need to go back further in the product lifecycle - if you're not designing the chips, you don't know everything they do.

I don't need to build your computer if you're building in my back door for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Cederic - Re: What counts as foreign?

This time it's not only about back-doors. It's about being knocked-out technologically when US will turn their sights on them, because that day will certainly come. Winning the war with Russia which looks increasingly like a done deal gives US a huge amount of confidence (and a playbook) to attacking their next target that is China. Time is ticking for China and, unfortunately for them, the only ally that could have possibly helped is being disabled right now.

[mathew42]

> China is becoming less dependent on western technology.

But as COVID-19 showed, the West is becoming more dependent on China. How secure is the western supply chain?

The "Golden Arches theory" as outlined in The Lexus and the Olive Tree states No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's.. Unfortunately the idea that globalization and economic integration would lead to peace appears to have failed.

[robn]

Yes, Russian invasion of Ukraine refutes that theory. Unless you consider it a "Special military operation" and not a war. Or the closing of all MacDonald's in Russia means this doesn't count.

[Adrian 4]

Seems pointless getting rid of foreign hardware. The software is far more obvious a route for spying.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was possible to fully disable or replace the encrypted software, that has full access to the network, RAM and all hardware, then that would make total sense.

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel and https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd

But currently you can not, so I can see the logic in removing foreign hardware. In fact considering the scope of spying even on allies (e.g. greek watergate; "spying between friends just isn't on" - Angela Merkel, 2013), I would have expected more to either more join the "fourteen eyes" if they can (like Germany did three years after dropping the the Merkel case) or for governments without that option to restrict foreign hardware to non-essential functions. But that is getting harder and harder, when even a single laptop could potentially contain 10+ independent MPU's/MCU's scattered around the board (GCHq publicly destroying the laptops containing Snowden leaks, was a great example of where spyware is installed on modern hardware - https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/02/guardians_destroyed_hard_drives_to_become_va_art/ ). Or a worse option would be to go back to simpler times and use 20+ year old hardware were all the software can be replaced.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could look at this as the destruction of everywhere that software was installed on that particular make and model of laptop. There is far more software that most people think and not all of it can be replaced without having access to signing keys with the the required development and testing environment. And most is encrypted as well as being signed. If your replacement code is not signed with the correct key you can not install new software, the hardware will reject it.

There are images in this video of where angle grinders and drimels were used in the guardian basement on the laptop that contained the Snowden leaks under the direction and supervision of "Ian" and "Chris" from GCQH https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jan/31/snowden-files-computer-destroyed-guardian-gchq-basement-video

[Clunking Fist]

Wow, thanks for that link. What a pointless exercise. Governments, eh?

[NoneSuch]

Be assured that all forms of access are considered equally by spy orgs. Hardware, software, firmware, middleware, iDrac, iLO, drivers, operating system, BIOS, Tempest, ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth, IoT, the electrical grid and the user are all targets.

Your stuff as well by the way.

[Version 1.0]

For any country it's very profitable for local companies when you say "replace all foreign devices with locally made devices"

It's the same as the recent "upgrade" of cell phones to 5G ... now everyone needs to buy new phones so the main feature is not performance or safety, it's just an economic boost.

[Aitor 1]

Nope HW is not secure.

Intel processors run a full os inside the processor, similar from AMD, also on the nics, the hard drives, and the uefi. And none are under the users control.

No wonder the US knows what the Russians are up to.

Obviously the Chinese are not happy with the situation, but as much as they claim to be going made in China reality will probably prevail, they just can't live without us controlled technology, I see it as a fantasy.

[bombastic bob]

The software is far more obvious a route for spying.

you may have made a case for people in China, Russia, and anywhere else that might be frightened by a U.S. company that is in control of whether their computers work or not, to perhaps invest in something *LIKE* ReactOS development.

(I cannot imagine what went wrong with Red Flag Linux but I can bet it was a cross between "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and the overall looming threats that exist under any communist or otherwise oppressive regime, particularly the looming threats that stifle innovation and creativity).

Keep it open source and the world may thank them very very much!

[John Brown (no body)]

Depends what they mean by "foreign owned" companies.

After all, most of the hardware is assembled in China from China made components by companies which are either 100% Chinese or *partially* foreign companies, ie foreign companies with a presence in China need a 51% Chinese owned share to be allowed to operate.

Depending on how they enforce this ruling, it may simply be a drive toward more locally built components, cutting out imports from fabs in Philippines, India etc.

[Joe W]

Re: Depends what they mean by "foreign owned" companies.

Depends what they mean. AFAIK Intel and AMD are not Chinese companies... And where do you draw the line? The place where the components are assembled? The source of the components? The source of the microchips and circuit boards for the graphics card? The source of the raw materials?

These statements are fundamentally stupid in today's very interconnected world. I'm not saying you should not care where the stuff came from and under which conditions it was made, but the issue is fsck'ing complex.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Depends what they mean by "foreign owned" companies.

Obviously they are going to use macbooks running linux

[Lars]

Nothing to see here

Nothing dramatic when a country, any country, for instance, suggest people buy a domestically made car.

Or for instance abroad "sausage anglaise".

[3arn0wl]

Re: Nothing to see here

Certainly, on that level, the move is not unreasonable - many other countries have done the same with any number of products. And there are any number of China-built electronic devices available to choose from.

But China is looking to go US-IP-free... by 2025...

The next level might be for them go X86 and US-produced proprietary software-free. Chinese OEMs produce a range of goods here too - powerful ARM products that can run Linux or AOSP/HarmonyOS - but it might be a harder sell to the consumer, as people like to use what they like to use. So they might be asking government employees to show some leadership here.

The ultimate aim though, would be to have Chinese-designed RISC-V (or Longsoon) processors, open source software, and workarounds for parts which have US patents, like USB... Hence I was wondering (further down) whether the Alibaba Wuying device might fit this brief.

[Lars]

Re: Nothing to see here

@3arn0wl and others.

Please try to remember that patents grow old, as the Wikipedia has it:

"A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time....".

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: Nothing to see here

> But China is looking to go US-IP-free.

China is looking to be free of legally acquired US IP.

[cookieMonster]

This. . .

We also asked Apple to comment because a predictably uncommunicative communications department is always good for a laugh.

Is why (IMHO) the Reg is the dogs $@$&”

[tomgid]

They have much better outlooks than Russia. No need to elaborate when they're a country of a couple of billion with decent education and culture upon which a functioning society could thrive. Too bad the West in the 90s couldn't figure out if the Japanese could emulate our success, so can the Chinese.

And they impose a lethal ban on drugs, by which their people still ardently abide. Big difference compared with the West.

[martinusher]

>Too bad the West in the 90s couldn't figure out if the Japanese could emulate our success, so can the Chinese.

We used to accuse the Japanese of making cheap copies of our products, they were notorious for it. I don't think anyone talks that way now. The Chinese have been following a similar path and, as you've noticed, there's rather a lot of them.

>And they impose a lethal ban on drugs, by which their people still ardently abide.

This is just a cultural echo from the Opium Wars where "the west" imposed sales of opium on them to cope with a trade problem due to us buying too much stuff from them and not having the wherewithal (silver, in this case) to pay for it.

They're not quite as strict as, say, Singapore.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

We used to accuse the USA of making illegal copies of British inventions.

[Lars]

"Opium Wars where "the west"".

Please that was all the Empire and damned dirty too.

[W.S.Gosset]

> due to us buying too much stuff from them

No, due to Britain buying too much _tea_ from India as demand exploded for the new drink, and India demanding silver specie in payment. Britain sought to close that loop locally without the long, risky sea transports of silver.

And the Chinese drug problem, and the govt clampdown in response, massively preceded the British involvement let alone the Opium Wars. Be careful of retconned "history".

Interestingly, the British re-opening of the Chinese opium industry to facilitate their tea trade, directly led to the Chinese wiping out over 90% of Australia's Aborigines in a single decade in the 1870s-1880s.

[Cederic]

Any suggested reading around Chinese activities in Australia in the late 19th century? It's an aspect of Australia's history I know little about :(

[W.S.Gosset]

Well, this one was just straight mercantile opportunism on a micro level. With the opium trade re-flourishing and mobs of coolies entering Australia for work, they brought opium dealers&dens into the country. The standard dens' method was to have the opium sitting on a small ball of cotton or similar, and when you smoke it that way, most of the actual high-potency drug simply melts and runs and soaks into the cotton. So after the customers had staggered off, they had all these super-potent cotton balls remaining. Seeing the Aborigines' enormous enthusiasm for whitey's alcohol, they tried the cotton balls on them, and they loved it. Brilliant: additional market, more money. Problem: super-potent. The Aborigines would basically wander off, pass out randomly in the bush, and die. Exposure, respiratory shutdown, both, who knows. This was apparently all only out in the bush -- I haven't seen anything regarding it happening in the cities.

The whiteys eventually woke up to what was going on, had no legal traction to do anything about it, and so started hammering the city folk to sort out some laws or policing or something. I think the tipping point was when the squatters (Britain's wealthy landed gentry's unwanted kids who bought & ran the big farms) found out and started jumping up and down. There are letters on file from some of the big boys who had the direct ear by personal connection to the legislators, office-holders, etc and it seems that about then things started to happen. By this stage, the fatality estimates in the bushies' letters were around 90%.

It culminated in what I believe was the world's first ban/control of opium. eg "Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897".

You'll note there's a sharp dislocation in publicly-presented "traditions" by Aborigines from about that time onwards -- the survivors&kids had virtually no context any more and just started making shit up. You'll see photos from the '20s of Aborigines posing in their kangaroo skin cloaks, but they're on inside out, that sort of thing.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

"...they're a country of a couple of billion..."

Have you had a look at their demographics? It's even worse than us thanks to the (now-abandoned-but-culturally-entrenched) one-child policy. They're about a dozen years behind the Japanese but only with fractionally better support.

[W.S.Gosset]

And we outsiders only see the (relative-to-China) wealthy middle & upper classes.

The Premier of China proudly announced in June 2020 that now "only" 40% of Chinese workers earn less than $4.65 a day.

[3arn0wl]

Alibaba's Wuying

I'd still very much like to know what's inside Alibaba's Wuying DAAS device.

Alibaba, we know, has a family of RISC-V XuanTie processors, some of which are capable of running Linux...

Could Alibaba have produced a suitable bit of kit to transition to? It's possible.

[StrangerHereMyself]

Unpredictable

The problem with authoritarian regimes is that they're unpredictable in their ways. They may, for once, actually ENFORCE a ban on foreign PC's. I, for one, see no problem in them doing this since Lenovo PC's are just as functional as their American counterparts (although arguably not as well-designed and made).

That, however, still leaves the software being American. And that isn't going to change overnight since it would require substantial investment by the Chinese government over many years to build up a home-grown market for Linux-based software (entirely feasible). But it would also risk them losing touch with Western technology since many tools (say a CT scanner or lithography machine) made in the West require Windows-based computers to operate.

[martinusher]

Re: Unpredictable

Don't call China's government an "authoritarian regime", that's just propaganda-speak. We're obviously "democratic" (good) so they're obviously "authoritarian" (bad) but these terms don't stand up to even superficial scrutiny. The fact that the Chinese government has a policy making body similar to the Japanese MITI should be no surprise and given both hostility from 'the west' and chronic security and stability problems with our software its not surprising they'd be looking for more controllable (and cheaper) alternatives. (Hardware they've pretty much got sewn up -- its only in "the west" that we need to run octo-core processors with countless gigabytes of memory to manage our email because of all the 'analytics' that's going on in the background.)

Its not true that many tools such as CT scanners require Windows to operate. It is true that the applications bit is run on Windows -- still -- but based on personal experience its just a reflex, a "we've always used this platform" reflex based on a pragmatic choice from 30 years ago or so that's set in stone because of the hassle of changing it. A clean slate approach would avoid the platform like the plague, it has few advantages and plenty of disadvantages, and I think that even Microsoft recognizes this with its initiative to incorporate Linux into its platform. So, yes, there's no impetus for change here but there's a lot of impetus for change there so it will happen, and it will probably happen a whole lot faster than you might think.

[lglethal]

Re: Unpredictable

China's not authoritarian? Right...

And Ukraine is full of Nazis, Russia is not invading them, the Moon is made of Cheese, Donald Trump is merely misunderstood, and the Sun rotates around the Earth.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Unpredictable

Don't call China's government an "authoritarian regime", that's just propaganda-speak.

Communist dictatorship, then. Under THAT system, your life is owned by the state. you have NO rights, and can be "disappeared" or "relocated" at the whim of the CCP (ask the Uyghurs about that, or anyone who said the origin of COVID-19 was a. "lab leak" and it was "genetically altered for gain of function research").

It is the OPPOSITE of democracy. Just ask the lockdown victims of Shanghai.

[these things SHOULD be obvious to the most casual observer]

[bombastic bob]

Re: Unpredictable

The problem with authoritarian regimes is that they're unpredictable in their ways

That's one problem, for sure. Capricious heavy-handed top-down dictating of policy, and don't you DARE deviate for ANY reason. That kind of thing.

A corollary of that, the constant looming threat of social credit scores and "getting disappeared" is probably in the back of EVERYONE's mind. As I have mentioned before, this STIFLES creativity and innovation. Why? Because if you tell the boss his design is flawed, and your idea is better, will that cost you your JOB? Your LIFE? Your FAMILY'S LIFE? That's not going to get things "done well with rapid turnaround", for sure.

Ran into some related problems a while back, where it seemed to me that you cannot explain to an engineer in China, what is obvious to you, that a problem exists in their design. In this case they simply would not accept that a problem even existed, or that our fix [that partially reverts their design change they did without telling the customers] actually solves the problem. But a year later they come up with their OWN fix, not OURS not the one WE recommended, even though it worked and was cheap to implement (even as an equipment field change) until the OEM manufacturer could get their collective acts together and actually FIX the problem their previous 'new design' actually CREATED in the first place...

(this story concluded also with a few engineers and techs actually going to China to help resolve other manufacturing-related issues, in December of 2019. yes no significance here, not like I caught "the virus" from anyone who'd been there or anything and got sick upon returning to the USA, before anyone had even heard of "the virus", but I digress...)

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

So even China can't get rid of the Windows virus...

[To Mars in Man Bras!]

>>"We reached out...|

Twats!

[Anonymous Coward]

they already make all the components,..?

... oh, I see that intel compatible chips are made in Taiwan....

that might be bad news for Taiwan :-(