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.
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 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
China is single-handedly propping up Iran, NK, and Russia financially. If you ahem removed the top 1000 leaders of the CCP tomorrow, those three countries wouldn’t be able to continue their population repression and the world would be an immeasurably better place. Iran killed, what, 20k of their own population earlier this year? Russia has lost 10x that this year alone. Blocking tech from China directly hampers their funding of these countries. Am I wrong?
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
What comparative advantage exists for high technology? I get it for things like agriculture and resources, but what intrinsic barriers are there to computer chips and cars? Especially when we're talking about the heart of the global supply chain, where there really is a comparative advantage in that standing up a logistical competitor would take decades of focused investment.
Anyone who understands China knows that they want to be the master of their own destiny, and China understands that this means self sufficiency when it comes to technology. This is one of the many lessons they learned from the "century of shame". Anyone who thinks they don't want to eventually dominate all technologies in the name of security hasn't really been paying attention.
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.
The cost is not just pure development. There are very high switching costs, and downstream opportunity costs affecting the entire ecosystem. As an example, Nikon was competitive with ASML in DUV for a while, but no one was willing to switch because the cost/risk was way too high. For lithography, that was essentially the issue - no serious foundry was willing to take the massive risk to move away from ASML - and, worse, to skip EUV.
A second reason is that Chinese foundries still had to compete with foreign foundries. The cost of doing lithography with new Chinese DUV machines will be significantly higher than with ASML DUV and then significantly higher than with ASML EUV. So to build an ecosystem that can one day truly compete with ASML, you'd need the entire Chinese semi industry to take significant losses to get to the point where they can compete with ASML and pose a threat in the market.
There is still many sectors like this where China has some kind of parity, but at a total cost of ownership so much higher than western competitors than they are not a serious market threat in the near future. In fact, the US, EU, etc... are in similar positions. Unless the Chinese economy becomes much stronger than the US/EU across the board, one would expect it to be case due to comparative advantage - the cost of directing industry to ignore superior alternatives will slow them down in other fields, unless the Chinese economy is just that much more effective. So without sanctions, it's difficult for the Chinese state to force enough cooperation to solve the issue without spending amounts of money that are a significant drag even to China.
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.
Let's not act like China doesn't use export controls for their geopolitical desires.
"China halts rare-earth exports to Japan after Japan detains a Chinese fishing-boat captain near disputed islands" [1].
"China suspends natural-sand exports to Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taipei" [2].
"China bans exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials to the United States in retaliation for new U.S. semiconductor restrictions" [3].
"China restricts exports of dual-use goods to U.S. defense companies in response to U.S. sanctions on Chinese firms" [4].
"China bans exports of dual-use goods that could strengthen Japan’s military following tensions over Taiwan" [5].
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.
Look up when American companies got banned and when TikTok and Huawei got banned.
American companies have been banned decades earlier.
> Also are you going to simply ignore the fact that Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China?
Also, are you and the other commenter ignoring the fact, thousands to millions of companies from China sell in the US?
Temu and Shein are still free to sell forced labor lead-infused goods. Lenovo still works. So do millions of tiny Chinese brands on Amazon.
You ignored that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are completely banned in China. Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps are completely unavailable in mainland China
TikTok wasn't banned (but had to restructure) and RedNote operates without any changes.
> Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China
Yeah, and both companies manufacture heavily within China
When China eventually catches up on conventional lithography, the goalposts will simply shift to silicon photonics and optical logic, a transition DARPA laid the publicly visible groundwork for decades ago through programs like POEM and PIPES while keeping the mature implementations strictly classified until needed.
Are these tippy top-secret Skunkworks Final Boss Wunderwaffen with you in the room right now?
More and more there seems to be some wishful thinking that the USA has another hidden generation of SR-71 or Stealth tech type surprises squirrelled away for a rainy day. Find this hard to believe when the best brains of the generation got hoovered up by hedge funds, click merchants, and now token slingers.
Is there anything to stop the Chinese doing a silicon photonics end run independent of cracking EUV at scale? Or is getting EUV right first on the critical path? This part is a genuine question.
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
Anyone who understands China knows that they want to be the master of their own destiny, and China understands that this means self sufficiency when it comes to technology. This is one of the many lessons they learned from the "century of shame". Anyone who thinks they don't want to eventually dominate all technologies in the name of security hasn't really been paying attention.
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.
A second reason is that Chinese foundries still had to compete with foreign foundries. The cost of doing lithography with new Chinese DUV machines will be significantly higher than with ASML DUV and then significantly higher than with ASML EUV. So to build an ecosystem that can one day truly compete with ASML, you'd need the entire Chinese semi industry to take significant losses to get to the point where they can compete with ASML and pose a threat in the market.
There is still many sectors like this where China has some kind of parity, but at a total cost of ownership so much higher than western competitors than they are not a serious market threat in the near future. In fact, the US, EU, etc... are in similar positions. Unless the Chinese economy becomes much stronger than the US/EU across the board, one would expect it to be case due to comparative advantage - the cost of directing industry to ignore superior alternatives will slow them down in other fields, unless the Chinese economy is just that much more effective. So without sanctions, it's difficult for the Chinese state to force enough cooperation to solve the issue without spending amounts of money that are a significant drag even to China.
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.
"China halts rare-earth exports to Japan after Japan detains a Chinese fishing-boat captain near disputed islands" [1].
"China suspends natural-sand exports to Taiwan following Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taipei" [2].
"China bans exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials to the United States in retaliation for new U.S. semiconductor restrictions" [3].
"China restricts exports of dual-use goods to U.S. defense companies in response to U.S. sanctions on Chinese firms" [4].
"China bans exports of dual-use goods that could strengthen Japan’s military following tensions over Taiwan" [5].
[1] [https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/revisiting-china-japan-rare-e...](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/revisiting-china-japan-rare-e...) [2] [https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/economic-sanction...](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/economic-sanction...) [3] [https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor...](https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-bans-expor...) [4] [https://apnews.com/article/1aebe98718e127365859b0fb0b63d07b](https://apnews.com/article/1aebe98718e127365859b0fb0b63d07b) [5] [https://apnews.com/article/0ea90fa798771c9fb650422ca3e21e09](https://apnews.com/article/0ea90fa798771c9fb650422ca3e21e09)
btw photo on that article is actually intel at Oregon
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/
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.
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.
Also are you going to simply ignore the fact that Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China?
American companies have been banned decades earlier.
> Also are you going to simply ignore the fact that Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China?
Also, are you and the other commenter ignoring the fact, thousands to millions of companies from China sell in the US?
Temu and Shein are still free to sell forced labor lead-infused goods. Lenovo still works. So do millions of tiny Chinese brands on Amazon.
You ignored that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are completely banned in China. Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps are completely unavailable in mainland China
TikTok wasn't banned (but had to restructure) and RedNote operates without any changes.
> Tesla, Apple et. al. are operating just fine in China
Yeah, and both companies manufacture heavily within China
More and more there seems to be some wishful thinking that the USA has another hidden generation of SR-71 or Stealth tech type surprises squirrelled away for a rainy day. Find this hard to believe when the best brains of the generation got hoovered up by hedge funds, click merchants, and now token slingers.
Is there anything to stop the Chinese doing a silicon photonics end run independent of cracking EUV at scale? Or is getting EUV right first on the critical path? This part is a genuine question.
Yeah, no one in with decent knowledge of tech would think a cutting edge nation like China couldn't figure this out.