After living and working in China 10yrs and fundamentally experiencing the growth rate and culture, it's been a bit horrifying to watch the Western world consistently decide withholding tech from China and giving them no other option but develop their own tech, is a good idea. They are the ultimate long-term planners and I have no doubt the existing gaps will be relatively short lived before China closes them.
I worked in China for 9 years and I really don’t think it makes much of a difference. China is not dumb enough to think that just because they can get it from the west today they can get it from them tomorrow. They were always going to develop their own semiconductor and jet turbine tech and industries, among other. They didn’t do it just to spite the west for not selling them the chips they wanted.
Sure but nobody in the world is denying that China's recent lightspeed advances in these areas isn't due to the trade war Trump started in his first term. It had an immediate and massive impact on China's economy and they had an equally massive response to it. China experienced the equivalent of the 1973 energy crisis that the US experienced in response to its role in the 1973 Yom Kippur War
Withholding technology is the only tool we have. If we let them have the tech it's not like they'll start depending on us. They will simply replicate the machinery and then someone else will be writing a comment on Nacker Hews in this alternative Earth about how we were such fools in the West to simply let them have our technology thinking that would make them depend on us. In fact, we have this evidence because all the news about Hygon Dhyana being based on a nerfed Zen 1 had all Internet commentary shaped like "We're such idiots to let them have this. We are the eternal morons!"
Literally every non-embargoed technology they have access to they instantly build and enhance. They have industrial and manufacturing iteration ability far beyond what we have. They won't be grateful to us, they won't be dependent on us, they won't be supplicants. They are well on the trajectory to being an equivalent world power with divergent objectives and thinking that handing them R&D is going to slow a negative outcome for us is wishful thinking.
Sometimes the only plan available is not a great plan. That's just how it is. The world sometimes gives you constraints that don't have a happy solution. You race down the precipice on whatever you have. And look what we earned for it: almost a full decade before they got here. That's amazing.
The US only had the bomb exclusively for 4 years before the USSR got that. We had 18 months before they got nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles. We got 8 years of EUV that China couldn't match us in. Precious 8 years and ongoing.
For highly complex technologies that require tons of capex to get anywhere, Chinese firms are perfectly happy to depend on foreign companies if they are allowed to.
Chinese chipmakers weren't willing to use the first batch of domestic DUV machines because they simply weren't as good as foreign alternatives, and this made it doubly difficult for domestic machine manufacturers: they couldn't get revenue for selling machines, and they couldn't learn from their customers' experiences. The Chinese government, for example, is now apparently withholding Nvidia chips from being imported - despite the export ban being partially lifted from the US side - in order to incentivize local companies to use domestic NPUs instead.
Similarly, on a personal level, most of the (technical) folks I know here in China are using Claude/GPT models because they want to use the best models available. But, companies like Bytedance (Doubao) cannot use such models to serve their customers, and ordinary folks also cannot access these models without workarounds. As such, the market for domestic AI models is huge, which has uplifted a lot of the current AI model providers.
Ultimately, this creates a funny conundrum: sanctions mean that certain parts of the Chinese population can still access the "banned" tech - able to experiment with it and learn from it - while spurring domestic companies to seek domestic alternatives.
I don't see how the alternatives ends any differently? We manufacture in China, they copy the products with lower margins then western companies can't compete on price.
they copy the products with lower margins then western companies can't compete on price.
I think this is outdated thinking in 2026. It's more like western companies go to China, look at designs that China has done, then decide to buy them in bulk while slapping their own logos on them with some small modifications.
Then these western brands slap a big markup on the products. So it isn't that western companies can't compete on price. It's just that the prices from Chinese companies are much closer to the source without western markup.
The vast majority of electronics you're buying on Amazon from western brands were actually fully designed and manufactured in China.
The steelman of the argument is that, due to legacy in technology and comparative advantage, unless they expect a serious supply chain tech, many core technologies will be too expensive to duplicate for China and so there will be areas where they will not advance. There is some amount of evidence that was true for lithography, they did not seem to be making much progress until they were forced to, and there didn't seem to be enough capital available in China to catch up.
Of course, the extent to which they was true and for how long it would be true is up for debate, but it's not a prima facie foregone conclusion
I'm not an expert at all so I have to wonder which core technologies were/are too expensive to duplicate for China? Afaik semiconductors represent the cutting edge of manufacturing technology; if China is able to duplicate (or even innovate, as demonstrated by "3d Logic folding") in this industry, I can't imagine how any other sectors would be too expensive to duplicate.
Who knows how far they progressed in lithography once it became clear that withholding technology would be the official state policy-- I heard the Chinese state got involved in developing EUV in a way comparable to the Manhattan project in scale and secrecy.
All of this can be traced back to the 2018 blacklisting of ZTE, and the continued willful ignorance of China's capabilities, and of the history of industrialization and technological progress.
But isn't it easier to copy some existing approach than to create it from a green field? ASML tech is presumably highly protected, but China is also very good in spying, hacking etc.
This stuff is really hard to copy. China basically had to put in all the cold era materials research along with getting up to speed on current tech, from scratch. They were/are always going to catch up because they have the resources to, but there are no shortcuts.
Yes. But it's not as simple as just having access to ASML's ip. They have exclusive rights to all the components and inputs, which are also protected and are also hard to make.
It's a whole system that China needs to duplicate.
True but also catching up to an existing tech is a much different game than creating it from scratch. Hiring people who have the right knowledge can speed that up.
The core stuff is under heavy lock and key. I’m not sure China can hire people that know the whole process, let alone the bits and pieces they can’t easily figure out on their own. The tech seems to have been locked down by a few western countries, and it’s hard to find any holes in their secrecy.
I'm not sure how true this is but I've read in other threads that ASML employs many Chinese engineers, and also read other news that the Chinese state is paying engineers working abroad at companies like ASML alluring salaries to get them to work back home.
Sure, and spent most of it experimenting with something nobody knew would work in production or not, and needed a lots of breakthrough ideas that are now known as the machines exist.
This, these news organizations have no f'n clue. China this, China that, it's all part of the 10 billion China spends on b.s to feed the Americans that they are behind or they are useless and that they don't stand a chance....
China is on the verge of collapse walking the razors edge.
Yes. China is behind on some of the crucial technology that gives the West its advantage, but this framing that the country is on the verge of collapse is just not true.
Also recreating a know technology usually takes much less time even if you don't have access to the underlying tech.
I mean, it's possible that an economy, especially of a major nation, can be on the verge of collapse and that it can be pushing technical frontiers. It's even possible that pushing those frontiers can forestall or reverse the economic collapse.
There are certainly a lot of people who think the above applies to the US.
Oh my, this comment section reeks of western hubris. Yes Europeans are the only intelligent beings on planet, please keep thinking that way, also please build a wall around Europe and its colonies so the barbarians stay out. Please please please. LOL
Literally every non-embargoed technology they have access to they instantly build and enhance. They have industrial and manufacturing iteration ability far beyond what we have. They won't be grateful to us, they won't be dependent on us, they won't be supplicants. They are well on the trajectory to being an equivalent world power with divergent objectives and thinking that handing them R&D is going to slow a negative outcome for us is wishful thinking.
Sometimes the only plan available is not a great plan. That's just how it is. The world sometimes gives you constraints that don't have a happy solution. You race down the precipice on whatever you have. And look what we earned for it: almost a full decade before they got here. That's amazing.
The US only had the bomb exclusively for 4 years before the USSR got that. We had 18 months before they got nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles. We got 8 years of EUV that China couldn't match us in. Precious 8 years and ongoing.
Chinese chipmakers weren't willing to use the first batch of domestic DUV machines because they simply weren't as good as foreign alternatives, and this made it doubly difficult for domestic machine manufacturers: they couldn't get revenue for selling machines, and they couldn't learn from their customers' experiences. The Chinese government, for example, is now apparently withholding Nvidia chips from being imported - despite the export ban being partially lifted from the US side - in order to incentivize local companies to use domestic NPUs instead.
Similarly, on a personal level, most of the (technical) folks I know here in China are using Claude/GPT models because they want to use the best models available. But, companies like Bytedance (Doubao) cannot use such models to serve their customers, and ordinary folks also cannot access these models without workarounds. As such, the market for domestic AI models is huge, which has uplifted a lot of the current AI model providers.
Ultimately, this creates a funny conundrum: sanctions mean that certain parts of the Chinese population can still access the "banned" tech - able to experiment with it and learn from it - while spurring domestic companies to seek domestic alternatives.
Then these western brands slap a big markup on the products. So it isn't that western companies can't compete on price. It's just that the prices from Chinese companies are much closer to the source without western markup.
The vast majority of electronics you're buying on Amazon from western brands were actually fully designed and manufactured in China.
Of course, the extent to which they was true and for how long it would be true is up for debate, but it's not a prima facie foregone conclusion
Who knows how far they progressed in lithography once it became clear that withholding technology would be the official state policy-- I heard the Chinese state got involved in developing EUV in a way comparable to the Manhattan project in scale and secrecy.
They will catch up and pass the West.
Take nuclear weapons: even Pakistan and North Korea were able to catch up.
That aside, China will master chip making at bleeding edge global scale, just as it did with EVs and rare earth processing, etc.
It's a whole system that China needs to duplicate.
China is on the verge of collapse walking the razors edge.
https://thediplomat.com/2015/03/why-do-people-keep-predictin...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also recreating a know technology usually takes much less time even if you don't have access to the underlying tech.
There are certainly a lot of people who think the above applies to the US.
btw photo on that article is actually intel at Oregon
if you do not want to pay $500 a month for Claude Max, maybe let China keep pushing engineering optimization. The U.S. and China should compete.
Interesting in so many ways that theinfo kept the company anon but Reuters exposed it (allegedly)
Aside: what we know for sure is that Chinese are catching up to Japanese in putting dad-style puns in their brands
https://www.hoshinocoffee.com/