It was known and was accounted for.
The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology on our terms instead of their own.
They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost.
It will pay itself and offset those costs once they reach breakeven and start selling their equal or better tech in the international market, displacing the incumbents.
Of course this doesn't automatically mean China wouldn't eventually pull ahead without the external pressure either. I'm just not as convinced it was so clearly a forced opportunity cost loss as much as something which provided a washed mix of both friction and acceleration despite assuredly preventing the US from making more money while its tech was farther ahead.
What was the opportunity cost in this equation? A substantially smaller bailout for their commercial real estate market?
> [The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology] on our terms (emphasis added)
What terms did we dictate? Timelines? Trade?
How does America or the West emerge ahead here?
> China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge
I’d say the lead is so slim it’s basically already gone. At least in the practical sense. If you were to isolate both right now. Cut them both off from the outside. One would be able to produce a modern cellphone the other would not.
Any sort of residual technical lead in the pure IP/knowledge sense is good for 3 years max I reckon.
Still, I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.
There is no public evidence that Chinese consumer tech has ever been used to spy for the Chinese government. None. Meanwhile, the USA has been caught running mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and tapping the phones of its own allies. That is confirmed. And yet it is the USA making the most noise, spreading fear about Chinese tech. People only seem to worry when the device doesn’t have a US brand on it. You can be a patriot, but don’t be naïve. Believing unproven claims while ignoring confirmed facts is not critical thinking.
In contrast, the West has been caught with INTENTIONAL backdoors - many of which have been directly linked to government and intelligence services. Juniper firewalls had a secret access mechanism tied to compromised cryptography. Trustwave issuing subordinate certificates to facilitate MitM snooping on all TLS traffic. Netgear and Cisco devices including undocumented public-facing remote access features. These were not speculative or theoretical. They were discovered, documented, and in some cases quietly patched without disclosure.
None of these were revealed out of transparency. They were found by researchers or whistleblowers. If there is no public evidence against Chinese devices, there is no case. Assuming intent without proof is not analysis. It is projection.
And let’s not ignore the obvious: many of these devices are manufactured in the same Chinese factories. But once a US brand name is stamped on the box, the fear seems to vanish. Somehow, they stop being a threat...
> Still, I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.
The game is afoot, and China knew to de-risk and decouple. I don't think that it can be stopped at this point.
HarmonyOS, RISC-V, DeepSeek, domestic EUV, etc. China is standing up its own tech pillars.
So I suppose American lawmakers see this as a game of slowing down the competition rather than fully impeding it. China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge, or if that edge will even matter.
In the meantime, we're holding up our own tech giants up to antirust scrutiny (and rightly so). But does that also hinder America's lead on China? And, if so, what will that mean for the tech/AI race?
Europe is also hell-bent on slowing down American tech. Again, rightly so - data sovereignty is important, and anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviors have long stifled domestic industry and talent. American giants shouldn't be allowed to behave that way as guests in other peoples' homes.