> After all, necessity is the mother of all inventions. If china was able to buy, at "slightly" elevated prices, western produced chips, the gov't would not really be able to convince businesses to take the hit and pay high capital cost to produce a worse version just as a stepping stone. The investment capital is likely to be wasteful, or misspent - since the "fallback" of western products are available (until they go to war like russia, and the cut off is abrupt and sudden).

What do you mean? This is China we're talking about. Every major company has a cell of Communist party members. If the government makes a decision, you follow and don't complain too loudly or risk political consequences. And, IIRC, the Chinese government already made the decision to build up their chip industry years ago (Made in China 2025).

IMHO, it's quite plausible that not implementing an export ban would have just allowed them to make the transition to domestic production more cheaply and more smoothly.