People have no idea how little their electronics industries mean on the world stage.

I believe it would be no big stretch to say that PV cells research in the West is nearly inconsequential to the industry, when all what matters happens within 100m of the silicon furnace without much pomp, and published papers.

I believe it's similar to how semi industry turned to be. Process engineering is a giant research discipline, but everything below the "tip of the iceberg," which is academic research, happens on the fab floor, and stays a factory secret. That's why importing Taiwanese engineers is a prerequisite to setting up any serious high volume fab on 300mm.

Oh, yeah, even the CKS32 chip on my Blue Pill only has a Chinese datasheet. It's common. (Worse is when you can get the Chinese datasheet at all only if you know the right people, who invariably live in Shenzhen. Or Wuxi, or maaybe Taipei.) It's not a totally new problem. My aunt had to learn German for her chemistry degree back in the 01960s, and here in Argentina pretty much everybody who learns to program has to learn English. Gauss wrote his dissertation in Latin; Euler wrote most of his papers in Latin. As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.

But where was RISC-V designed? At Berkeley. By professors and grad students from China, Korea, Vietnam, Poland, the US, Greece, and Germany, I think. (Asanović is naturalized American.)

I agree that there's a lot of unpublished knowledge (PV is part of the semi industry), and a lot of that knowledge is being created in places like Wuxi. But I don't think it's true that the tip of the iceberg we can see is so inconsequential. That tip is what prevents things like the circa-2000 capacitor plague, and many new developments originate in basic research long before they make it to mass production, PERC being perhaps the latest.

Also, you can bet that the rulers of Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt are not enthusiastic about their countries' access to their own abundant solar energy being dependent on their foreign relations with China, or on China's internal industrial policy; nor do they want their solar power stations to ship with Chinese remote kill switches—not currently a thing, but certainly feasible if China's bargaining position improves sufficiently.

We've seen how that kind of thing plays out many times: the US backdoor in Crypto AG hardware, the US blockade of oil to Japan in WWII, the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, the constant struggles with US export controls in every country that isn't the US (Tianhe-2 being a recent salient example), China's rare-earth exportation clampdown 10 years ago, the US oil blockade that led Germany to spin up Fischer–Tropsch coal liquefaction, the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh, and so on. So quite reasonably they're investing in the possibility of developing autonomous national solar industries, a 21st-century Saudi Aramco and YPF, just without the oil.

Will they be successful? Maybe. Or maybe they'd have to do what China did for process engineering: get Chinese PV companies to open factories in Egypt and Jordan in order to transfer the necessary knowhow.

> As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.

Care to explain it further?

(By the way, I searched for the quote to try to read it in the context in which it was first made but couldn't find it. So I guess it's a paraphrase.)

If you use your computer only through Nautilus, Firefox, and Instagram, you will commonly encounter software problems that you cannot solve, or solve only through a lot of manual drudgery. But, with a deeper understanding of the layers behind the simplified interface—layers which, for historical reasons, commonly work through "command lines", such as the JS console in the browser, the GRUB command line for booting Linux, or of course the Linux bash prompt—you often need only minutes to solve problems that would have taken hours or days to solve by hand.

Similarly, today, if you want to solve hardware problems, you will often find yourself confronted with datasheets or forum threads that are written in Chinese. If you don't speak Chinese, you will either be unable to solve the problem, or you will have to reconstruct the information needed through experimentation, or by help from someone who does speak Chinese.