Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.
If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.
The ever closing gap between the capabilities of frontier models vs chinese open weight models.
That's not a strategy that leads to actually being the best.
The phrase is “fait accompli”, without a D, and is French for “accomplished feat”.
Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.
If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.
If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.
Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
Which broadly leads to two conclusions:
They can't do it. If they could they would. If you could invest and create your own Nvidia, ASML, TSMC, &c. you would do that especially if you are China due to its stated goals and actions it takes that we can all see toward those goals.
They can do it and so selling them the chips doesn't matter other than helping to speed up their ability to do it, so we don't want to sell them the chips and thus speed up their capabilities.
But your viewpoint also holds true for the United States and Europe. Anything China can do we can also do, otherwise you're just supposing Chinese Exceptionalism.
If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before the is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has misaligned to desire.
AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.
No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War, and then managed to subsequently starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then managed to right themselves. They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use.
Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?
China is a trading partner but there is still a serious catalyst for war in the form of the South China Sea. If we went to war with China in 5 years time, why would we sell them the tech they need to match our ability now? Let them figure it out on their own.
An economy kept dependent on American tech is unlikely to drop bombs on America and vice versa. Co dependency prevents war.
"Good thing China doesn't have a long memory or anything!!"
Good luck with that folks...
Soon, China, if they aren’t already, will be the premier developer of Thorium reactors courtesy of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and they also are now number one or at the least 1A when it comes to high-speed rail, and if the Russians and the Ukrainians weren’t fighting each other, that high-speed rail probably would be already built out all the way to eastern Europe.
For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.
And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.
It's just myopia.
Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA - and leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future.