China is quietly reducing its reliance on foreign chip technology
economist.com
economist.com
Also funny if you think like: quietly! Not like here, first shouting out loud and announcing and promising whatsoever.. and then later see what's really delivered? :D
Imagine you are a parent of a meritorious child, above average student you may say. You know that your child will grow more if he gets access to the books of the nearby library. But you can't get the books because the library is controlled by elites and denying access (or asking higher price) to you because you are a peasant. What will you do to solve the issue minimizing the damage?
If people put to a back in the wall situation thousands pages of moral teachings becomes mute.
If you're referring to a specific, discrete group of people, you could just name them instead of using a laundry list of questionable adjectives. But that wouldn't imply a global cabal, and so you couldn't oh so subtly and inconspicuously point fingers at an ethnic and religious minority.
In the US he is known as the father of American factory system. In Britain he was known as "Slater the Traitor", because he stole their IP and brought it to the Americas.
What goes around comes around, I guess.
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
Like the US did.
The US was one of the the leading inventors of the industrial revolution among nations and there's no evidence to suggest that the US stole more from Europe than Europe stole from the US leading up to the 20th century.
People never provide more than a tiny number of examples while making that outlandish claim (that the US became a superpower heavily in part due to technology piracy). Which stacks against the vast scale of the US economy over time and its gigantic demonstrated inventiveness.
By the time the US economy was the size of China, it had already given the world an absurd number of prominent technologies and scientific achievements. That happened in part due to the renowned productivity of the US university system, which the world has been trying to copy since WW2.
China has given the world what compared to Apollo, the Internet, the transistor, microprocessor, GPU, Hubble, GPS, powered flight, or cracking the human genome? Nothing, crickets.
How about something comparable to inventing the first video game, which is courtesy of the US? Nope.
All that economic output, where's their Internet equivalent contribution?
All those are more recent and I could argue they're built on an industrial base built on IP theft :)
Even if one were to buy into your claim, you ignored the further, rather critical point.
By the time the US was the size of China economically, it had already given the world a vast number of prominent contributions in the realm of technology and science. Where is China's equivalent with all that economic output?
The center of the CRISPR revolution is in Boston, not China. The center of the mRNA revolution is in the US and Europe, not China.
Even Tesla fled to the US, where he did most of his work; by intent he did not want to be in Europe. If the industrial revolution was powered by one man, it was that one and he didn't do it in Europe.
Tesla only moved to the US in 1884. This article is talking about events that happened 70 years before, even before the civil war, when half of the US economy was cotton farming.
You still haven't demonstrated the industry isn't based on IP theft :)
Paper, the compass, gunpowder, paper money, porcelain, tea, and a bunch of other stuff.
China was poor and rural in recent times, so it wasn't at the forefront of technological development, but now it's back at the forefront. Just to give one example, China develops some of the world's most advanced batteries nowadays.
Patents and attempts to protect them is a relatively new conception, and it's not so easy to tell if it was a good thing for humankind as a whole or not.
But it entirely misses the point. It doesn't matter if China develops the next node or two or even more, it's that China is permanently set back in developing advanced nodes so that its government and military is disadvantaged.
It all comes down to the big question that will determine who wins these great power struggles: can free and democratic societies innovate and advance quicker and more effectively than oppressive regimes?
I guess we'll get our answer on this soonish, but I know who I'd put my money on.
If advanced nodes are crucial to military development then why does the most advanced jet fighter in the world still use 90nm nodes?
The priors are very suspicious if you ask me.
Remember last year: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/how-h...
There is no "quietly", China is proud of it, they are building a domestic industry
Also remember of this retaliation WRT trade sanctions:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3249253/why-...
Not say no hard work was put into it, but from my perspective that have certain advantages to leverage while doing the work.
And they have critical mass now, so it accelerates every time the west closes off some of our technology to them.
What did American executives think was going to happen when they got involved with a communist dictatorship on the dictatorship’s terms? (Rhetorical question; they were greedy and wanted short-term profit above all else.)
China was in fact contend with the deal of being so far behind in semiconductors as long as they can import them. They could have invested even more in domestic semiconductor development, but chose not to because they assumed that they could just import what they wanted. 10 years ago, the Chinese govt set a target to produce 70% semiconductors domestically, but the Chinese industry didn't cooperate at all because of how easy and cost-efficient it was to import. With these sanctions, they now face an existential threat and thus they must progress. Yes maybe that comes with some spying and copying, but it seems ludicrous to me to focus so much on it. You deprive a person from his source of food and then when, out of desperation, he starts to steal, you complain about his bad morals? That outcome should be the more predictable one.
Western states deserve to have their asses handed to them on this. This was a double-whammy of stupid assumptions: that the rest of the world-- with different backgrounds and needs-- would forever accept the "let's legislate that water runs uphill" IP narrative, and that other countries were willing to remain trade vassals forever.
If it takes industrial-scale Chinese copying to force technology to march forward, I'm all for it.
I also love the tendency to cast this as moral argument-- "they're StEaLiNg our tech." If anyone is immoral in this situation, it's the IP holders. They're bottling up the very progress of mankind to ensure they can make their quarterly sacrifices to the almighty Market God, and we've just normalized it here. I hope that their attitude towards intellectual property gets ever laxer and shows us a new way forward.
China made huge leaps lately not because they suddenly poured a lot of money in this effort. They poured money in this effort for multiple decades, but progress was slow because the foundations were not there. However, investments in previous decades built such a foundation, which is why they are now making a lot of progress.
To add on to this, China entered the Fab space in the late 90s/early 2000s when vendors in MY, SG, SK, JP, TH, and TW began outsourcing low margins sectors such as Memory, Photovoltaic, Packaging, and OSAT to Guangdong+Fujian in the early 2000s due to falling margins
It takes a generation to build the supply chain needed for precision fabrication, and in certain sectors of the Chip industry (eg. Design) China is still somewhat behind (though it is changing rapidly due to investments in the 2010s).
I'm no wumao, but a lot of the criticism against China's R&D capacity on HN is just plain stupid and show a ridiculous lack of understanding of EECS, business, or East Asia.
HN has severely degraded, and people are getting downvoted to oblivion for bringing this up.
But China can afford to subsidize $1000 chips, especially if that means not having any chips at all.
Nothing is wrong in this statement.
Most vendors can do 3nm, but probably not at production scale other than ASML.
28nm is very worrying from a NatSec standpoint though - way more than leading edge nodes - as that enough to produce a Sandy Bridge or Maxwell type architecture, which meets the needs for most American defense applications (eg. drones, precision missiles, C-RAM, etc)
Russia manufactures their Elbrus-8s architecture using 28nm lithography as well, and that's the backbone for most of their newer precision, electronics, and avionics weapons systems.
The same reason there's all those jokes in "Silicon Valley" (the TV show) about the "brain rape" episodes and End Frame of Season 2, where all they do is lure Richard into a meeting and then get him to put the whole algorithm up on the board.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(season_2)#Epis... ("Runaway Devaluation")
Nope.
There are too many moving parts to make this realistic. You'd have to steal the IP of hundreds of vendors across an entire supply chain AND THEN finance.
It's a hurculean and unrealistic task.
Let's say Slack's source code got leaked. Can you become an effective Slack competitor just by copying them?
Now imagine that the semiconductor industry is many times more complex.
Also look at what the Chinese semiconductor industry is actually doing. Anybody who pays attention sees that they're trying out new things, choosing solution directions that are free from foreign IP. Chinese fabs are replacing foreign equipment with Chinese (incompatible) equipment. Why would they do all that instead of doubling down on hacking and stealing? Why would Chinese equipment not be drop-in-compatible if copying and stealing is so lucrative? Why would Huawei drop all Android support, instead opting to design their entire OS stack from the ground up in an incompatible manner, instead of leeching from open source Android forever?
Example https://twitter.com/tphuang/status/1757448248443257038
Oh, how to fail to acknowledge a culture... China never boasted work in progress. And since their largest companies are tied to the government, I don't think they'll be tempted to do that any soon.
For instance, after the many "sanctions" imposed by USA China has stopped submitting benchmark results from their top supercomputers, to make more uncertain their true capabilities.
Also Huawei has no longer published detailed descriptions of their new smartphone chipsets, like they were doing when they could still manufacture them at TSMC.
The so-called "sanctions" used by USA are not real sanctions. Real sanctions are conditioned by political demands, like requesting guarantees from China that they will not attempt to expand outside their current territory, or that they will treat fairly their minorities.
The USA "sanctions" are just anti-competitive measures designed to sabotage the competitors of US companies like Qualcomm and Micron and they have been introduced precisely when those companies were in serious danger to be overtaken in the market by their Chinese competitors.
The principal effect of the USA "sanctions" has been to ensure higher prices all over the world for certain consumer products, mainly for smartphones and SSDs. Their military effects are negligible.
There are detailed descriptions, but it's not widely released in English globally.
It's basically an Easter egg: there's no 5G icon in the UI, but when you run a network speed test, you realize that the phone is connecting to 5G.
Imagine Russia and Iran having access to hundreds Petaflops computers or even exascale! Maybe it's pricier even with less margin than US offerings and more difficult to use, but that'd least of their concern.
Oh no?
Seriously though, so what if they do?
Iran can likely just ask Russia for modern missile and nuclear technology in their current relationship.
Having access to that computing power would make it easier for main MAD foe to maintain their arsenal, among simulating tons of other things for aerospace and defense. There's just no good reason to let them have that capability.
Also should be noted PRC is only party projected to train enough talent for entirely indigenous semi supply chain. Everyone else is projected to be short 10s-100s thousand talent by end of decade. The real threat to west is if billions in global south move to cheap as dirt PRC hardware on harmonyOS.
China and the US have fundamentally the same goals of free trade and making sure nobody else gets nuclear weapons, there are just disagreements over spheres of influence and governance.
Russia and Iran are criminal syndicates with an enslaved population, they don’t give a fuck about the ramifications of what they do because their geopolitical strategy is just enriching oligarchs, not enriching the population. China knows the population only puts up with their shenanigans because their quality of life is getting better, so that has to keep happening and that means working with the west.
That’s why China’s “no limits” relationship with Russia ended when Russia wanted Chinese weapons in Ukraine. China just wants to shake things up, not create a new world order like the other “anti-west” countries.
Any other pacific islands that a couple American entrepreneurs are frustrated by?
Was there any case of a "successful" sanction in history? Or is holding back a country for a few years (or decades depending on the tech) considered a success?
"Chip War" to some extent makes the argument it's in the more recent times we've seen US legislators lack of maintaining as much interest in export controls that has lead to the erosion of this advantage, not that controls don't work at all per se.
The export controls work in some cases not because the facts or design of the tech is unknown; the issue is that many cutting edge technologies need an entire complex ecosystem of businesses, people, production and supply lines to be present to work too - it's often this part that becomes very hard to simply replicate - see Taiwan's huge lead in chip manufacturing despite being in a hugely politically unstable geographic location. It's taking the USA decades to try and bring that kind of manufacturing capability at the cutting edge back to the US, and the US still can't compete with the scale Taiwan can produce the latest chips at.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/02/23/busi...