But from who and where will Huawei future growth come from? Domestic Chiba sales alone. Their market presence is very strong there, but in the EU and US definitely not the case. It will be interesting to see if their tech can overcome the politics.
I highly doubt Africa cares about 5G as much as the west does. Someone will need to pay for that stuff and 5G also needs to be hooked up to a backhaul which supports 5G speeds.
China tends to offer these countries loans and even subsidies so they can build that infrastructure. Trade off is that China will control that part of that country’s operations for the foreseeable future. It’s how they came to control many ports in developing countries.
Your comment could also be considered a form of propaganda.
Another layer of the onion is the truth values (perceived/cultural truth, "actual" truth, etc) of the respective claims, though that often gets overlooked when it comes to propaganda, or geopolitics in general.
If the article was written in China and allowed to be published it was reviewed and aligned to the ideological language and goals of the CCP by government propaganda officials. That’s the way the laws work. It’s not a form of propaganda to recognize the structural fact that any material originating from China is, by intentional construction, propaganda.
>If the article was written in China and allowed to be published it was reviewed and aligned to the ideological language and goals of the CCP by government propaganda officials. That’s the way the laws work.
If you're trying to imply the fact the article is published implies there's some sort of CCP interference, that makes no sense considering that The Economist is blocked in china. Moreover there's a decidedly anti-CCP article published in the same issue as this article[2], which further strains the claim that The Economist is some sort of pro-CCP publication.
I didn’t say anything about the magazine. I was referring to where the article was originated. You’ll notice your second article wasn’t published from within China.
Specifically :
America’s assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring
The company is growing stronger—and less vulnerable
An American man cutting the red Huawei flowers off their stems with a scythe.
illustration: julia kuo
Jun 13th 2024| —> shenzhen <—
The location listed on articles refers to where the reporting was primarily done by the reporter(s) involved.
The article isn't "published from within China". And it's misleading to say it's "material originating from China".
It's material originating from the Economist, a British publication, from a reporter who traveled to (or is based in) Shenzhen to research this story. China has no say whatsoever in the content of this story.
The point of putting "Shenzhen" as the location is simply that this wasn't reported by a journalist merely sitting on their couch in London. Good reporting generally requires you to actually go to the places you're reporting on.
>I was referring to where the article was originated. You’ll notice your second article wasn’t published from within China.
???
"Chaguan travelled to Tongren to weigh claims that coercive assimilation is now the norm. While in Qinghai he was followed by up to five unmarked cars. Tibetan-speaking officers (one of whom flashed a police badge) filmed and eavesdropped on conversations. "
Or are you claiming that going into China and doing anti-CCP reporting is fine as long as the article isn't "published" in China (whatever that means)?
> If the article was written in China and allowed to be published it was reviewed and aligned to the ideological language and goals of the CCP by government propaganda officials.
It's a great meme, but is it true (warning: be careful subconsciously inferring an inadequate variable type here)? Are you even able to wonder about the truth of such matters after having your mind subjected to unknown amounts and forms of Western propaganda?
This is not a rhetorical question by the way: I pose it sincerely and literally, and challenge you to answer it. I greatly enjoy exhibitions of extreme cognitive capabilities, please don't hold back.
> That’s the way the laws work.
At best you can know what laws exist on the books (I doubt you even know this), it is not possible for you to know how and to what degree they are implemented & enforced.
> It’s not a form of propaganda to recognize the structural fact that any material originating from China is, by intentional construction, propaganda.
a) You are expressing a personal opinion in the form of a fact.
b) Your claim is comprehensive ("any material"), thus necessarily speculative.
c) "by intentional construction" - intentions are not (and cannot be in this case) achieved with perfection.
> Whatsboutism doesn’t change that.
Thinking in simplistic memes like this can cause "reality" to appear other than it actually is.
Sir: have you seen the movie The Matrix? If so, what was your take on it?
They're not really contradictory. From the economist article:
>Some of the home-grown chips that Huawei is using are thought to cost several times more than their foreign equivalents and remain in short supply. But the fact that Huawei has been able to get round the sanctions at all in such a short time is a surprise. [...]
>China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of AI for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now
They're not claiming that Hauwei/China caught up to the west in terms of semiconductor technology, or even that the ones they can produce are without problems.
First of all, the Economist has correspondents all over the globe for their foreign reporting. Virtually every piece about a country is written by a reporter in that country. And reporters covering a country are often foreigners as well. So of course it was written in Shenzhen, this is how all their articles are written. But the Economist is a British publication.
And second, there is nothing propagandistic whatsoever about the article. It's simply reporting the facts of how Huawei has responded to America's sanctions -- at length and in great factual detail.
Here are the concluding paragraphs:
> America’s policymakers are also learning from their mistakes. The gradual ratcheting-up of sanctions on Huawei, and especially the 28-month gap between the announcement of the most severe measures in 2018 and their implementation in 2020, gave the firm lots of time to prepare, China hawks lament. But the bigger lesson from Huawei’s torment has not yet sunk in: that cutting the firm off from Western technology did not stifle it, but instead increased its incentives to innovate.
> China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of ai for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now.
This isn't pro-CCP at all. Rather it's pointing out the flaws in how America implemented its policy, and the risk that it's actually backfired in the long term -- and that America might need new and better thinking here for containing China's technological progress.
If you were pro-CCP, you wouldn't want to publish an article like this at all, because you wouldn't want people in the US to even become aware that the sanctions had actually increased innovation within Huawei. As they say, never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.
The economist is notoriously anti-Xi. But they are a free trade publication.
As an aside, I’ve become less of a fan of Economist over the years. Not because this article per se, but because they tend to be years late to the obvious conclusion. Which in this case was that sanctions would help Huawei (as most smart people realized within 5 minutes of the sanctions coming out).
What do you mean by "post like this". I raised my concerns in good faith about the trustworthiness of this particular article and how it aligns with a broader geopolitical strategy by the CCP to influence western media.
It's a good update, but the framing is that primary goal of the US was to ruin Huawei rather than to stop depending on their products. I'm not sure how true that is.
If all the US wanted to do was to "stop depending on their products", why would they seek to prevent US and foreign companies (if they're using US technology) from selling to huawei? That seems to go far beyond "stop depending on their products".
>I think that’s sometimes framed as not wanting to help China improve in technologically advanced industries?
If this was the case we'd pull all manufacturing out of China completely. The knowledge transfer from the US to China when it comes to manufacturing, from basic goods up to modern tech, has been wild. With that comes a lot of information on how to advance technology.
There are geopolitical and economic advantages gained by the west through denying China access to ASML’s semiconductor tooling. Western aligned semiconductor companies have the leading edge semiconductor market locked down, and forces China to use semiconductors that aren’t bleeding edge for their own internal use, militarily or otherwise.
I’m speculating that the vast manufacturing knowledge transfer to China through offshoring is seen as a “bad thing” by western politicians, who then sought to limit China’s ability to do the same with semiconductors.
China will likely figure out EUV eventually, by hook or by crook. There’s only so much you can do to keep that knowledge contained, considering the amount of people who have the knowledge.
> An executive from Clarin, an Argentine media group, told a Huawei event in May that his firm was replacing expensive Oracle database software with Gauss, Huawei’s offering.
This seems like an odd development. I can well understand why an organisation would want to drop Oracle RDBMS, but why move to another proprietary solution? The obvious replacement for Oracle's database is Postgres, no?
Is Huawei getting into the business of customizing their software to fit organisational processes then charging through the nose for that work?
I looked into OpenGauss a while back. It seems really solid. Among other things, they added various compatibility modes for stuff like software that targets Oracle. They have a ton of customers, and a ton of revenue.
The US-imposed export ban has completely backfired in this case. It's equivalent to China forcing everyone in their own market to subsidize direct competitors to US firms. The electric car subsidies DC is complaining about are nothing compared to this.
I remember when the export ban took effect. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that the outcome would be a much stronger Chinese technology sector.
I can't decide if US leadership is really that dumb, or if there's some sort of conflict-of-interest / corruption / coercion at play.
I don’t think the goal was ever to bankrupt Huawei so some US form could swoop in. It was and is about national security. Do you think China wouldn’t bug equipment sent to the US? That seems like a bad bet.
If that were the case, the US government would not ban US companies from selling to equipment and software to Huawei.
After all, if all the US were worried about were back doored Huawei equipment (of which there's no evidence), why would it care if Huawei phones in China use Google services?
Also, if the goal wasn't to bankrupt Huawei, what was it?
Force them to become market leaders across a broader part of the technology sector? That's been the effect of the export ban. How was it supposed to reduce the amount of wiretapping, etc. they can do?
I'd also like to know how nabbing the Huawei CFO (who also happens to be the daughter of the founder) in Vancouver fits in with just preventing bugged equipment (again, for which there's no evidence) from being installed in US networks.
The US has gone after Huawei in such an all-encompassing manner that it's impossible to maintain the fiction that this is just about preventing Huawei from spying on the US (something that Huawei has never done anyways, as far as anyone knows).
It's about control - Huawei was taking over too much tech for the deep state's taste.
Deep state is bugging American devices so they have a very good reason to believe the other side is doing the same - evidence or not.
Unfortunately in this case, I think the deep state is really that dumb. They did not foresee the consequences. They expected Huawei to fade away with a whimper - and if you read the article, it was a pretty close call, so the expectation wasn't entirely unfounded.
Motive was curbing Chinese state actor influence and also industry, ie preventing Huawei from crushing Google or Apple. it's not very smart but it's kind of how they think about it.
On both sides, tech companies and state intelligence services are walking hand in glove. It's not about devices being bugged per se, it's about siphoning more and more data into their own data centers, controlling more and more of the info highways, and so on. Potential backdoors only play a very minor role IMO - anything can be backdoored these days, and state actors anywhere have the resources to get into anything.
It's more about the front doors, ie our chinese security camera talking to chinese servers... large scale data collection that's not hidden.
It’s true. Decoupling leads to the fragility before open trade. People forget part of the reason for global free trade was intertwining of economies leading to critical dependency, which goes in two ways. By forcibly severing that you create a decoupling, which leads to more unilateralism, which leads to more war.
Looks like they've switched from the PostgreSQL license to something called the MulanPSL-2.0 license. Looks like it's an adaptation of the PostgreSQL license, but that's from my non-expert eyes looking over it. :)
The article is just a huge gaslighting piece. The U.S. was trying to reduce exposure to Huawei equipment in U.S. and allied Critical Infrastructure. The Chinese government and intelligence services were using the equipment for espionage. Huawei was dumping (economic term for selling below market home price or sometimes manufacturing cost) 5G equipment on U.S. telecoms.
China already had good success with a similar model dumping large power equipment on regional utilities in the U.S. to the point where it's no longer economically feasible for it to be removed, and the U.S. was forced to pivot to attempting to mitigate (vs. eliminate) the risk.
It was never an assassination attempt, but an attempt to increase the cost of doing business and further incentivize the CCP to waste money and run their economy less effectively.
Everyone seems to be ignoring the core thesis of this article and seems to only be discussing the title
> America’s policymakers are also learning from their mistakes. The gradual ratcheting-up of sanctions on Huawei, and especially the 28-month gap between the announcement of the most severe measures in 2018 and their implementation in 2020, gave the firm lots of time to prepare, China hawks lament. But the bigger lesson from Huawei’s torment has not yet sunk in: that cutting the firm off from Western technology did not stifle it, but instead increased its incentives to innovate. China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of ai for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now.
Basically, the ad hoc and imprecise sanctions regime used by the Trump admin gave too much lead time for Huawei to begin indigenizing its capabilities.
This is a mistake the US learned from and can be seen with SMIC, YMTC, and other state run champions (BYD is a domestic champion but NOT state run).
I'd highly recommend listening to Rush Doshi if you want to understand the US's China policy - he's the NSC Advisor who was in charge of China policy in the Biden admin until a couple weeks ago.
I don’t know if people are ignorant or just misinformed. Do you really think China wasn’t already actively building and/or stealing this tech while still doing business with American companies? This has been their MO for a decade now and people are still trying to claim America fighting back is somehow helping China. Such a ridiculous take.
I’m not in a spot to dig it up, but processor tech was something the party decided was a national security issue long, long before any sanction was even whispered about.
The October 7 sanctions seem to be a change to a shock and awe strategy. I am not sure that it worked for the bigger players. Both YMTC and SMIC seem to be making new technological breakthroughs still.
The stated goal was to prevent coins from breaking through 14nm. With the 7nm chips that SMIC has been manufacturing for Huawei, that policy has failed.
The entire strategy being pursued by the Biden administration is extremely dangerous. Sullivan seems to believe that he's some sort of guru, but the goal he's pursuing - of wrecking Chinese high-tech sectors using blunt American power - will not only fail, but will also lead to enormous tensions between the US and China. You simply can't behave in that sort of arrogant way towards another major power. China isn't some little country like Venezuela or Cuba.
I've never heard of the 14nm barrier in policymaking and cannot remember of one. If you can link me a first hand source I'd appreciate it. I might be misremembering.
Anyhow, this is the core of the Sullivan Principle from back in 2019 (and in development even earlier)
"The United States will also have to safeguard its technological advantages in the face of China’s intellectual property theft, targeted industrial policies, and commingling of its economic and security sectors. Doing so will require some enhanced restrictions on the flow of technology investment and trade in both directions, but these efforts should be pursued selectively rather than wholesale, imposing curbs on technologies that are critical to national security and human rights and allowing regular trade and investment to continue for those that are not. Even these targeted restrictions must be undertaken in consultation with industry and other governments; failing to do so could Balkanize the global technology ecosystem by impeding flows of knowledge and talent. Such a development would neutralize a key U.S. competitive advantage relative to China: an open economy that can source the best global talent and synthesize the biggest breakthroughs from around the world. Meanwhile, overreach on technology restrictions could drive other countries toward China, especially since China is already the largest trading partner for most.
In this respect, the Trump administration’s loud and largely unilateral campaign against the participation of the Chinese company Huawei in the development of 5G infrastructure may provide a cautionary lesson. Had the administration coordinated with allies and partners in advance and tried some creative policymaking—for example, establishing a multilateral lending initiative to subsidize the purchase of alternatives to Huawei’s equipment—it might have had more success in convincing states to consider other vendors. It then might have been able to make the most of the two-year delay Huawei now faces in rolling out 5G following its placement on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s list of entities that cannot be supplied with American technology. Future efforts to restrict trade with China in the technology sector will require careful deliberation, advance planning, and multilateral support if they are to be successful; otherwise, they will risk undermining U.S. innovation."
Sullivan changed his view, as he said in an extremely bellicose speech in September 2022.[0] The goal is no longer to have a relative lead:
> On export controls, we have to revisit the longstanding premise of maintaining “relative” advantages over competitors in certain key technologies. We previously maintained a “sliding scale” approach that said we need to stay only a couple of generations ahead.
> That is not the strategic environment we are in today.
> Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.
One month after this speech was given, the Biden administration put in place a whole series of measures aimed at preventing China from fabricating chips at or below 14nm.
That's why it was a shock when Huawei began selling phones with 7nm chips, produced by SMIC. Huawei specifically timed the launch to be during the visit of US trade representative Gina Raimondo, as a kind of middle finger to the US.
This is not really what happened. American policy makers weren't being lenient because they didn't how to kill Huawei, but because they wanted to keep the damages below the level that they believe would induce Chinese retaliations. Killing Huawei would have generated enormous collateral damages, when many of their allies depended on Huawei. Additionally US depends on China too. In an economic MAD world it is not at all clear people would care about 5G or 7nm chips.
Sure, that’s theoretically possible. You just need to eliminate resource scarcity (and/or human nature) and then your plan will work. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
Well, we are very close to that. So I guess, yeah, let's move that way.
(At least until fast-growing populations appear from the fringes and refuse to integrate into the main memetic pool. That one is at least centuries away, so yeah, let's move that way.)
Can’t really assess the quality of a pay walled article, but HUAWEI non capability to meet security criteria is something that was proven by someone very close to me (high school buddy working as a secirity specialist for counterspionage agency in Italy)
This evidence was mostly used as leverage to lower unit of piece cost by the government for low risk devices, whatever you get by my factual experience is up to you
72 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadAnother layer of the onion is the truth values (perceived/cultural truth, "actual" truth, etc) of the respective claims, though that often gets overlooked when it comes to propaganda, or geopolitics in general.
Whatsboutism doesn’t change that.
If you're trying to imply the fact the article is published implies there's some sort of CCP interference, that makes no sense considering that The Economist is blocked in china. Moreover there's a decidedly anti-CCP article published in the same issue as this article[2], which further strains the claim that The Economist is some sort of pro-CCP publication.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
[2] https://www.economist.com/china/2024/06/13/why-china-takes-y...
Specifically :
America’s assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring The company is growing stronger—and less vulnerable An American man cutting the red Huawei flowers off their stems with a scythe. illustration: julia kuo Jun 13th 2024| —> shenzhen <—
The location listed on articles refers to where the reporting was primarily done by the reporter(s) involved.
The article isn't "published from within China". And it's misleading to say it's "material originating from China".
It's material originating from the Economist, a British publication, from a reporter who traveled to (or is based in) Shenzhen to research this story. China has no say whatsoever in the content of this story.
The point of putting "Shenzhen" as the location is simply that this wasn't reported by a journalist merely sitting on their couch in London. Good reporting generally requires you to actually go to the places you're reporting on.
???
"Chaguan travelled to Tongren to weigh claims that coercive assimilation is now the norm. While in Qinghai he was followed by up to five unmarked cars. Tibetan-speaking officers (one of whom flashed a police badge) filmed and eavesdropped on conversations. "
Or are you claiming that going into China and doing anti-CCP reporting is fine as long as the article isn't "published" in China (whatever that means)?
It's a great meme, but is it true (warning: be careful subconsciously inferring an inadequate variable type here)? Are you even able to wonder about the truth of such matters after having your mind subjected to unknown amounts and forms of Western propaganda?
This is not a rhetorical question by the way: I pose it sincerely and literally, and challenge you to answer it. I greatly enjoy exhibitions of extreme cognitive capabilities, please don't hold back.
> That’s the way the laws work.
At best you can know what laws exist on the books (I doubt you even know this), it is not possible for you to know how and to what degree they are implemented & enforced.
> It’s not a form of propaganda to recognize the structural fact that any material originating from China is, by intentional construction, propaganda.
a) You are expressing a personal opinion in the form of a fact.
b) Your claim is comprehensive ("any material"), thus necessarily speculative.
c) "by intentional construction" - intentions are not (and cannot be in this case) achieved with perfection.
> Whatsboutism doesn’t change that.
Thinking in simplistic memes like this can cause "reality" to appear other than it actually is.
Sir: have you seen the movie The Matrix? If so, what was your take on it?
I have no way of assessing who is (more) correct.
>Some of the home-grown chips that Huawei is using are thought to cost several times more than their foreign equivalents and remain in short supply. But the fact that Huawei has been able to get round the sanctions at all in such a short time is a surprise. [...]
>China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of AI for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now
They're not claiming that Hauwei/China caught up to the west in terms of semiconductor technology, or even that the ones they can produce are without problems.
First of all, the Economist has correspondents all over the globe for their foreign reporting. Virtually every piece about a country is written by a reporter in that country. And reporters covering a country are often foreigners as well. So of course it was written in Shenzhen, this is how all their articles are written. But the Economist is a British publication.
And second, there is nothing propagandistic whatsoever about the article. It's simply reporting the facts of how Huawei has responded to America's sanctions -- at length and in great factual detail.
Here are the concluding paragraphs:
> America’s policymakers are also learning from their mistakes. The gradual ratcheting-up of sanctions on Huawei, and especially the 28-month gap between the announcement of the most severe measures in 2018 and their implementation in 2020, gave the firm lots of time to prepare, China hawks lament. But the bigger lesson from Huawei’s torment has not yet sunk in: that cutting the firm off from Western technology did not stifle it, but instead increased its incentives to innovate.
> China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of ai for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now.
This isn't pro-CCP at all. Rather it's pointing out the flaws in how America implemented its policy, and the risk that it's actually backfired in the long term -- and that America might need new and better thinking here for containing China's technological progress.
If you were pro-CCP, you wouldn't want to publish an article like this at all, because you wouldn't want people in the US to even become aware that the sanctions had actually increased innovation within Huawei. As they say, never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.
If you have specific facts you want to refute, I'd be interested to hear.
As an aside, I’ve become less of a fan of Economist over the years. Not because this article per se, but because they tend to be years late to the obvious conclusion. Which in this case was that sanctions would help Huawei (as most smart people realized within 5 minutes of the sanctions coming out).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe the article could have been framed in a less binary way: it didn’t slow them down as much as they hoped.
If this was the case we'd pull all manufacturing out of China completely. The knowledge transfer from the US to China when it comes to manufacturing, from basic goods up to modern tech, has been wild. With that comes a lot of information on how to advance technology.
I’m speculating that the vast manufacturing knowledge transfer to China through offshoring is seen as a “bad thing” by western politicians, who then sought to limit China’s ability to do the same with semiconductors.
China will likely figure out EUV eventually, by hook or by crook. There’s only so much you can do to keep that knowledge contained, considering the amount of people who have the knowledge.
This seems like an odd development. I can well understand why an organisation would want to drop Oracle RDBMS, but why move to another proprietary solution? The obvious replacement for Oracle's database is Postgres, no?
Is Huawei getting into the business of customizing their software to fit organisational processes then charging through the nose for that work?
Bribes.
And OpenGauss is based on Postgres:
https://gitee.com/opengauss/openGauss-server
The US-imposed export ban has completely backfired in this case. It's equivalent to China forcing everyone in their own market to subsidize direct competitors to US firms. The electric car subsidies DC is complaining about are nothing compared to this.
I remember when the export ban took effect. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that the outcome would be a much stronger Chinese technology sector.
I can't decide if US leadership is really that dumb, or if there's some sort of conflict-of-interest / corruption / coercion at play.
After all, if all the US were worried about were back doored Huawei equipment (of which there's no evidence), why would it care if Huawei phones in China use Google services?
Force them to become market leaders across a broader part of the technology sector? That's been the effect of the export ban. How was it supposed to reduce the amount of wiretapping, etc. they can do?
The US has gone after Huawei in such an all-encompassing manner that it's impossible to maintain the fiction that this is just about preventing Huawei from spying on the US (something that Huawei has never done anyways, as far as anyone knows).
Deep state is bugging American devices so they have a very good reason to believe the other side is doing the same - evidence or not.
Unfortunately in this case, I think the deep state is really that dumb. They did not foresee the consequences. They expected Huawei to fade away with a whimper - and if you read the article, it was a pretty close call, so the expectation wasn't entirely unfounded.
Motive was curbing Chinese state actor influence and also industry, ie preventing Huawei from crushing Google or Apple. it's not very smart but it's kind of how they think about it.
On both sides, tech companies and state intelligence services are walking hand in glove. It's not about devices being bugged per se, it's about siphoning more and more data into their own data centers, controlling more and more of the info highways, and so on. Potential backdoors only play a very minor role IMO - anything can be backdoored these days, and state actors anywhere have the resources to get into anything.
It's more about the front doors, ie our chinese security camera talking to chinese servers... large scale data collection that's not hidden.
The article is just a huge gaslighting piece. The U.S. was trying to reduce exposure to Huawei equipment in U.S. and allied Critical Infrastructure. The Chinese government and intelligence services were using the equipment for espionage. Huawei was dumping (economic term for selling below market home price or sometimes manufacturing cost) 5G equipment on U.S. telecoms.
China already had good success with a similar model dumping large power equipment on regional utilities in the U.S. to the point where it's no longer economically feasible for it to be removed, and the U.S. was forced to pivot to attempting to mitigate (vs. eliminate) the risk.
> America’s policymakers are also learning from their mistakes. The gradual ratcheting-up of sanctions on Huawei, and especially the 28-month gap between the announcement of the most severe measures in 2018 and their implementation in 2020, gave the firm lots of time to prepare, China hawks lament. But the bigger lesson from Huawei’s torment has not yet sunk in: that cutting the firm off from Western technology did not stifle it, but instead increased its incentives to innovate. China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of ai for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now.
Basically, the ad hoc and imprecise sanctions regime used by the Trump admin gave too much lead time for Huawei to begin indigenizing its capabilities.
This is a mistake the US learned from and can be seen with SMIC, YMTC, and other state run champions (BYD is a domestic champion but NOT state run).
I'd highly recommend listening to Rush Doshi if you want to understand the US's China policy - he's the NSC Advisor who was in charge of China policy in the Biden admin until a couple weeks ago.
I’m not in a spot to dig it up, but processor tech was something the party decided was a national security issue long, long before any sanction was even whispered about.
No. I and policymakers I used to work with have been cognizant about this for around a decade now.
Check out the Sullivan Principle - technology will diffuse, but putting roadblocks to maintain the existing lead is critical.
> but processor tech was something the party decided was a national security issue long, long before any sanction was even whispered about
Absolutely, yet 10 years ago China was 2 generations behind, and with Huawei's announcement, they are still 2 generations behind.
The difference is almost $100B was spent by the PRC just to keep the status quo.
These are hard problems, and very targeted and swift sanctions DO make it harder
The entire strategy being pursued by the Biden administration is extremely dangerous. Sullivan seems to believe that he's some sort of guru, but the goal he's pursuing - of wrecking Chinese high-tech sectors using blunt American power - will not only fail, but will also lead to enormous tensions between the US and China. You simply can't behave in that sort of arrogant way towards another major power. China isn't some little country like Venezuela or Cuba.
Who said that? The goal of the Sullivan principle was always a 2 Gen lead at scale [0]
[0] - https://www.belfercenter.org/event/competition-without-catas...
Anyhow, this is the core of the Sullivan Principle from back in 2019 (and in development even earlier)
"The United States will also have to safeguard its technological advantages in the face of China’s intellectual property theft, targeted industrial policies, and commingling of its economic and security sectors. Doing so will require some enhanced restrictions on the flow of technology investment and trade in both directions, but these efforts should be pursued selectively rather than wholesale, imposing curbs on technologies that are critical to national security and human rights and allowing regular trade and investment to continue for those that are not. Even these targeted restrictions must be undertaken in consultation with industry and other governments; failing to do so could Balkanize the global technology ecosystem by impeding flows of knowledge and talent. Such a development would neutralize a key U.S. competitive advantage relative to China: an open economy that can source the best global talent and synthesize the biggest breakthroughs from around the world. Meanwhile, overreach on technology restrictions could drive other countries toward China, especially since China is already the largest trading partner for most.
In this respect, the Trump administration’s loud and largely unilateral campaign against the participation of the Chinese company Huawei in the development of 5G infrastructure may provide a cautionary lesson. Had the administration coordinated with allies and partners in advance and tried some creative policymaking—for example, establishing a multilateral lending initiative to subsidize the purchase of alternatives to Huawei’s equipment—it might have had more success in convincing states to consider other vendors. It then might have been able to make the most of the two-year delay Huawei now faces in rolling out 5G following its placement on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s list of entities that cannot be supplied with American technology. Future efforts to restrict trade with China in the technology sector will require careful deliberation, advance planning, and multilateral support if they are to be successful; otherwise, they will risk undermining U.S. innovation."
- Jake Sullivan, 2019
> On export controls, we have to revisit the longstanding premise of maintaining “relative” advantages over competitors in certain key technologies. We previously maintained a “sliding scale” approach that said we need to stay only a couple of generations ahead.
> That is not the strategic environment we are in today.
> Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.
One month after this speech was given, the Biden administration put in place a whole series of measures aimed at preventing China from fabricating chips at or below 14nm.
That's why it was a shock when Huawei began selling phones with 7nm chips, produced by SMIC. Huawei specifically timed the launch to be during the visit of US trade representative Gina Raimondo, as a kind of middle finger to the US.
0. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
It seems like that is essentially humanity’s toughest challenge. Not the space race, not weapons, not global warming
Our hardest challenge is effective coordination
If we can solve that one, we can solve all the other ones pretty quickly
Well, we are very close to that. So I guess, yeah, let's move that way.
(At least until fast-growing populations appear from the fringes and refuse to integrate into the main memetic pool. That one is at least centuries away, so yeah, let's move that way.)
https://beta.economist.com/briefing/2024/06/13/americas-assa...