America's chip export controls are working

More Zhongnanhai-ology from our cold warrior correspondent.

As usual I feel like he overestimates the US' ability to impose rules and underestimates the Chinese ability to both circumvent those rules while developing self sufficiency. In addition we've all seen the Chinese ability to retaliate across a range of industrial sectors from rare earths to drug precursors. While these embargos would have some impact on Chinese chip development; initiatives like Huawei Ascend clusters and DeepSeek being trained on less powerful chips show that China will find a way to innovate whether or not they have access to the most powerful chips.

I feel like the piece overstates the importance of the AI race specifically. The recent field tests of the US' automated weapons systems are... not encouraging. [0][1] Unless you're an AGI booster that rather implies that crucial ability of US tech that China is missing is being able to generate Sora videos of fat people causing disasters.

In light of the 15th 5 year plan and its focus on self sufficiency without reference to the West these China hawks are increasingly irrelevant to the conversation unfolding outside the borders of the increasingly irrelevant and mistrusted US.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-navy-i...

[1]: https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/anduril-s-autonomous-weapon...