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.

There is this thing called payback. Chinese has a history of ultimate payback. The infamous very first one written down was eunuch Zhao Gao wiped clean entire Qin clan of Qin dynasty. WIPE CLEAN. When Deng met up with Thatcher, he gave her ultimatum to cede or army will march in that afternoon. That was just right after She won the Falkland war. USA will get Chinese payback. The only way to stop this is to invoke friend and savior role. Unfortunately, USA is playing the ultimate sore loser card with a generous dose of bullying. Be worry. Be very worry.

> They are well on the trajectory to being an equivalent world power

Equivalent is your wishful thinking seeping through.

> They won't be grateful to us, they won't be dependent on us, they won't be supplicants.

Oh no!!!

And yea, to think china will be ``equivalent`` to you is such a westoid delusion i dont even know what to tell you

maybe keep dreaming

> Withholding technology is the only tool we have.

The US has the strongest military in the world, tight control of a large part of the world economy, unprecedented cultural soft power, a permanent vetoing seat at the UN security counsel, vast territories, a 50-year headstart in space, thousands of nukes, dozens of cyber organizations with deep roots everywhere.

The embargoes and tariffs are literally a skill issue.

otoh they had a coordination problem and the idiot ``us`` solved it for them

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

And you believe that no other western country on this planet is doing the same exact thing? Every country spies on its enemies, allies and trade partners.

That is just the name of the game. I copy you, you copy me and hopefully I can copy you more than you can copy me. Singling out China for something that everyone does is just disingenuous.

Let us talk about how much tech the fledgling United States stole from the Europeans, starting from the cotton mill all the way up to the Tizard Project. The US literally stole companies overnight at the start of WW2 (Merck).

As the preeminent superpower, the US had its turn. Now step aside and make way for China.

If some nut job ordered assassination of 1000 PRC officials tomorrow, the world would be plunged into apocalyptic, possibly nuclear, war.

It's maybe the worst possible way to handle the situation even if you are a breathless US interventionist.

the USA is single handidly proping up a genocidal Israel and putting drunk TV hosts in charge of their department of war... and is at the tipping point of ethnic cleansing....

Somewhat over-estimating the numbers, but even if your stats were accurate it wouldn’t change the critique that “the west” does the exact same thing.

This isn’t what-about-ism, this is simply acknowledging the realpolitik that there are great powers vying for control over the rest if the world through proxies. A game as old as civilisation itself.

We support Ukraine, they support Russia.

We support Israel, they support Iran.

We X, they Y.

Neither is more right or wrong than the other, and neither is the only bad actor.

  they copy the products with lower margins then western companies can't compete on price.

Then these western brands add 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.

A huge portion of products you're buying on Amazon from western brands were actually fully designed and manufactured in China.

Not only that, go to a trade fair in China and you'll see that many of their products have surpassed the West in quality and design. They just haven't been exported to the west for various reasons including tariffs, marketing, no western partner. A big business opportunity in the next few years is to figure out how to help Chinese businesses export worldwide - usually marketing/branding/localization expertise.

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

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.

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.

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.

Schrödinger's economy

https://thediplomat.com/2015/03/why-do-people-keep-predictin...

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.

Doesn’t China heavily restrict competition in its domestic markets? Probably only North Korea is worse.

China is one of the most restrictive countries but expects full access to US market behaving like a US state or territory in its claims to US domestic markets lol.

Last time I checked, China is not a US province or territory but maybe that is the state of affairs China aspires to in the long term with Trump looking to add a new state.

There are a lot of very very very smart people working in defense. Gov doesn't pay the best but the benefits are unmatched.

Nobody is stopping the western countries of doing the same exact thing with their own industries. As a matter of fact, the EU and the US are subsiding a lot of their own companies or even entire sectors of their economy (agriculture/arms/space/IT... the list goes on) already so why is it a problem if China does it?

You can't complain about something that literally every single country on this planet is doing and then somehow be angry because China does it as well. Rules for thee not for me and all that.

The real difference between what China does and what the western countries are doing is that China jump starts some industries with heavy subsidies and then gives them time to catch up to international standards and finally turns off the money tap and it forces these companies to export their production outside of China and makes them ultra competitive which is clearly a win for the consumers.

That is exactly how it played out with EVs today. Compare that to the auto industry in the EU which has relied on the same state support for the last decades and instead of using this support to innovate and compete they simply squandered their advance in these industries and find themselves on the back-foot thinking that they could just keep doing the same thing and that everything will work out somehow.

Who made the EVs cheaper today? China by competing heavily while the rest of the world was busy milking as much cash as possible from their customers. What about solar panels, batteries, wind turbines? China, China and China again.