Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No It's a transpacific Kettle episode. We're joined by our Asia-Pacific editor Simon Sharwood for his perspective on the ongoing battle between America and China to stop the sale of advanced processors and chip manufacturing gear into the Middle Kingdom. That's good timing seeing as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation …
All they're doing is pushing China to create their own in-country solutions, which they seem to be doing just fine. Sure their CPUs are still dated and relatively slow, but they're far from useless and seem to be serving a lot of their needs.
Let's face it: unless you're serious gamer or designer or programmer that burns through CPU cycles like nobody's business, most people's machines are way overpowered for their actual workloads. You don't need a 4-12 core box to run a spreadsheet, and you don't need an RTX card to play a video game.
I predict that 5-10 years down the road, China will end up technically equal to or even surpassing the Americans on compute technology. There is absolutely nothing except first-to-market advantage that leads to American computer technology being "superior" at all. There are no shortage of high quality providers around the globe; it is just easier to "buy American" because it is more popular and readily available - for now.
Nuclear weapons is the least critical application. They have designed them just fine from adding machines onwards. There is no way that a lack of top grade GPU's changes China's ability to incinerate US cities one whit.
Even military drones are far more enabled by improvements in motors, batteries, power-fets, GPS, composites, radio chipsets, satellites modems, etc, than 2nm GPU's
AI shows rather clearly that access to the newest, shiniest, and most expensive stuff gives you qualitative, not just quantitative advantage.
If you think that China alone will be able to duplicate, let alone surpass, what the whole of North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are able to achieve in chip manufacture, then I have a bridge to sell.
> There is absolutely nothing except first-to-market advantage that leads to American computer technology being "superior" at all.
what TSMC and Samsung do is not just being first, they also can do that stuff at scale. So, just because a lab in china is able to make a 6 or even 4 nm chip doesn't mean they are able to make millions of wafers of the things every year, with reject rates in single digit percentages.
And "The West" is not standing still
If you stop and think a bit you'd realize that "Taiwan" is effectively part of China, its not really an island populated by foreigners but an island populated by Chinese, and Korea is in the same neighborhood and shares a lot of culture and history with China. So the idea that Taiwan and Korea could develop something while China couldn't is, frankly, ludicrous.
All we are doing with our sanctions and entity lists is disturbing the normal flow of commerce. It will mess the Chinese around a bit but since the regime has been imposed on them it gives them a national focus, a sense of purpose. It also deprives us of valuable markets. Since the goal of the BIS is to "keep China five years behind" then it won't affect their military capability one bit (you don't build weapons with unproven technology, you use mature technology.....assuming you want the stuff to work). Ultimately all we're going to do is turn our customers into our competitors. Smart move.
Taiwan ISN'T a part of China and its an insult to Taiwanese to say it is. The CCP have NEVER own Taiwan. There was a civil war which meant the lose of mainland China to the communists and the ROC legged it to Taiwan. Eventually stablished and formed a good government so are wildly more successful than CCP China is today. Also a lot freer. The only reason the CCP want Taiwan is for face and the chip factories (that will be destroyed if it looked like they were losing a war)
No, it's as relevant to the discussion as insisting that North Korea is Korean because it has Korea in it's name.
Both PR China (aka China) and DR China (aka Taiwan) are 'China', and the populations of both largely speak the same ethnicity, language and culture (with the notable exception of political culture)
>>> DR China (aka Taiwan)
For a start there is no such thing as "DR China". It's "ROC". If you get a visa it says "ROC" (as in "Republic of China"). No "D". It's implicit. You haven't been there apparently. My best guess is that you must be confusing with The Congo, Korea or Timor Leste.
>>> populations of both largely speak[sic] the same ethnicity, language and culture
Writing system is different. Taiwan still use the ancestral traditional writing system.
Peoples of Taiwan are more unified. There are the Hans (Hoklo, Hakka) and more ancient Austronesian minorities. Mainland China has a lot of inter ethnic tensions with Hans being dominant and often abusive.
Taiwanese people are gentle, industrious, well educated, xenophile, and have empathy. They are tolerant of religious beliefs, don't tear down churches and temples. They have much less criminality and they don't execute hundreds of prisoners per year - the last execution was 3 years ago. They don't keep themselves busy swindling each other. They are very proud of their rich past imperial and republican heritage, which they take great care of.
Mainland Chinese stand in stark contrast of all of the above, as whoever has lived in both countries will testify.
Also note that, even if people were much more similar, that would not imply they belong to the same country. After all France doesn't claim they will invade Canada, Switzerland or Belgium. History is history.
"Taiwan ISN'T a part of China.... CCP have NEVER own Taiwan"
Reading the original post, I don't think the writer was indicating that Taiwan was in any way *politically* Chinese, but that it was *culturally* Chinese, (and that China also shares similair cultural characteristics to Korea), and therefore if Taiwan and Korea could build the educative background and infrastructure to nurture chip-design and chip-building capability, that China would likely also succeed in that regard if it really put it's resources there.
As to the issue of scale, that is actually one issue where China could simply blow anyone else out of the water, it has far more resources than Korea or Taiwan, and in fact scale is what could give it a kickstart. Have crappy yields that are half of what Taiwan and Korea can achieve? No problem, just build the factory twice as large, twice as many production lines, they'll improve the yield gradually and still have lots of chips now.
I agree completely with your first paragraph, and disagree totally with the second.
China is not a valuable market. China is scattered with the bones of dead companies that thought this.
If the Chinese like your product they will copy it. If they can't copy it then they will require that it be built locally and then they will just steal it. As the courts in China are not independent and are controlled by the government then the law there is what's convenient for the government and even if the competition is making an unlicensed copy of your product including the original IP markings and trademarks if it suits China then their courts will ignore the evidence and rule against you. If you don't believe this, then look at the court case the EU has before the WTO at the moment.
China is already a competitor.
>>> If you stop and think a bit you'd realize that "Taiwan" is effectively part of China,
The Taiwanese people are as different as one can imagine from the mainland Chinese ones. Hong Kong are yet another style and Singapore yet another. Just travel there before parroting the Wolf Warrior's talking points.
Winnie's brutal takeover of Hong Kong opened the eyes of a lot of Taiwanese. And that's just one point in a large scatter plot of data.
If you think that China alone will be able to duplicate, let alone surpass, what the whole of North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are able to achieve in chip manufacture, then I have a bridge to sell.
You might want to think about that a bit more deeply. There are a great many Chinese. About 1.3B. That's about the same -- maybe a bit more -- than all the developed countries put together. The Chinese work very hard. They are literate., Probably as much so as the developed countries (They claim a bit higher. Maybe that's true). They have a great respect for education. Certainly more than the US which largely thinks that a college is a football/basketball team attached to a few buildings full of very odd people. One expects they can do just about anything they set out to do although there is probably a limit to how many goals they can work toward simultaneously.
I expect the Chinese interest in chipmaking is primarily in producing chips for consumer products for themselves and that they can peddle to the rest of humanity. That wouldn't seem to require the latest and greatest technology -- just something good enough. Military? I used to know a little about that. Maybe things have changed, but my experience was that military hardware has long development cycles, and a number of features, supply chain requirements, training requirements, wide operating temperature range, modest radiation hardness, ruggedness -- that mitigate somewhat against the very latest technology. In general, military gear isn't pretty, and not all that nifty. But most of it will likely work about as well as ever after being pitched out of a truck in the Arctic in Winter or a desert in Summer and driven over by the next truck in line. And whoever picks it up and dusts it off may well be able to operate it and might even be able to fix it when it eventually breaks.
My guess is that chip bans may have some affect on some research efforts and maybe on the Chinese intelligence services. But the impact likely won't be that great. At least that's been the story with prior technology bans intended to hinder China's space program.
The only example I'm aware of where technology export bans do seem to have been effective is jet engine technology. Probably there are others. But not many? Mostly they don't seem to work very well.
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Generative "AI" is nothing of the sort and is SERIOUSLY over-hyped. It is irrelevant, and won't matter one whit down the road when real AI technology comes along and people come the stark realization that generative "AI" is a scam that doesn't produce ACCURATE results - it just spits out out statistical averages with a bit of fuzzing.
And you do NOT need RTX-level graphics to enjoy a video game. NVidia sure has got you fooled if you think you do. Do you think people didn't enjoy their games for the 30-50 years they were playing before RTX cards were delivered?
The only example I'm aware of where technology export bans do seem to have been effective is jet engine technology. Probably there are others. But not many? Mostly they don't seem to work very well.
I think even that has changed. Sure, for commercial airliners flying international routes, there's a whole bunch of safety and certification that locks customers into Boing or Airbus. But China's been busily developing it's own civil and military aircraft. Sanctions just give China more incentive to become self-sufficient, and as it does, it'll mean more competition for Western aircraft manufacturers and parts suppliers. Especially as sanctions have also pushed Russia and China closer together.
They don't have to surpass the bleeding edge. But if they can offer silicon hardware that does 90% of what the bleeding edge does at 10%, they win.
As for AI, the jury is still out on that one. And there's a non trivial possibility that AI will also show exactly what happens to democracies when most decent jobs go away in a span of a couple years and the newly unemployed have zero job options apart from ones paying less than a quarter of what their old job paid.
I think we have already seen that in action in the global business community for some number of decades now. There is always some new "silver bullet" technology coming out, and there are corporations that buy into it and into the hype feet-first, and start laying off critical members of the employee and contractor community far too early for when the new technology can even be deployed, much less start producing the promised benefits.
But the beancounters and "investors" don't care about the long-term viability of a business; all they really care about is shareholder payouts and stock options.
China cant even build roads and buildings on the same level as Europe or Americas.
Goto YT or news, there are many many examples of roads and trains and buildings collapsing that simply doesnt happen in the west. I mean when was the last time you heard of not one but dozens of road holes just opening up in the west and yet thi shappens in china all the time.
google: China tofu buildings
"there are many many examples of roads and trains and buildings collapsing that simply doesnt happen in the west. I mean when was the last time you heard of not one but dozens of road holes just opening up in the west"
"The west" varies a lot there. There are for example, many examples of crumbling Infrastructure in the US (granted, for much older infrastructure). When you're building shit at 10 X the speed everyone else is doing, the quality will not always be great. I've also seen plenty of scandals in Italy and France, and presumably elsewhere in the west, where unscrupulous contractors or organised crime charged full whack for building with high-quality materials and then substituted or diluted them with crap.
If China can build 10X faster at 1/3 of the quality thats not a big problem for them, they will rebuild whatever breaks to a higher standard (and not give a shit about personal damage / loss of life to their citizens, who are simply pawns*).
*not that 'western' citizens aren't also, though to a lesser extent
That is the brutal truth of it: Chinese government members don't really care about the health and safety of individual members of the population. If a few die due to shoddy construction practices, but they can produce double the amount of product in the same amount of time, they consider that a net gain and a win for society.
We think differently.
We tend not to like it when people die so someone can turn a profit.
>>> I predict that 5-10 years down the road, China will end up technically equal to or even surpassing the Americans on compute technology.
The usual pro-Chinese-anti-sanction talking point again.
I'll play along, then...
"It's all on purpose, my friend, the US have at last admitted that Superior China would be a better humankind technology leader and they are forcing China to take the lead". Nice counter-counter-narrative. Right?
Your "5-10 years" is too pessimistic. What about 5-10 months?
China is many things but they arent a military threat.
I dont think we know or appreciate how corrupt and fake everything in China is. We have already seen Russia being a victim of its own corruption and fake ness with Ukraine. They should have won that war a long time ago but its pathetic how poorly their equipment is against western equipment.
Look at HIMARS, America has only supplied less than 20 and yet Russian airfields have had to move hundreds of kms back from the front lines. Im sure the chinese ledership have realised a lot of their military hardware is largely based off Russian stuff, and they dont want the west to see they are a paper tiger. Then again go and watch how many roads, and buildings collapse on a regular basis thanx to their engineering...
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