Can China Refactor Western IT?

If current trade disputes cut off China from Western tech, then China may be free to pursue IT standards and designs for internal use that are only partially interoperable with Western IT. Further, China may need designs that more efficiently use domestic chips and do not require as advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes. One way to achieve these goals may be to "refactor" Western IT.

The design of current Western IT is governed by a plethora of standards, both official standards from IETF, IEEE, ITU, ISO..., as well as unofficial standards set by dominant manufacturers and associations.

The complexity of standards grew over 4 decades because researchers want their contributions included, manufacturers want their patent positions protected, incumbents want their investments protected, and new entrants want extensions for differentiation. The complexity of unofficial standards grows because of multiple competitors in the same market, avoidance of patents, and backward compatibility to protect market positions. Besides the variety of standard venues, there is the inevitable commercial, political and interpersonal relationship issues that are settled by adopting compromises.

China, with less IT history and a large market, may be in a good position to analyse and extract a small subset of Western IT standards for internal adoption.

The West has coped with complexity by making very fast processors using advanced processes and implementing the complexity in software. With less complexity it may be possible to move more functionality into ASICs made by less advanced processes and achieve the same end user services results using less infrastructure and energy.

China may have an opportuntity to remove the cruft of compromise and the baggage of backward compatibility, and to refactor Western IT into a better system.