Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: FIRST: There are two and only two regions in the world that have successfully “converged” to leading-edge norms: Northwest and Southwestern Europe on the one hand, and the East Asian Pacific Rim on the other. With respect to the Pacific Rim, originally the belief was that it was Japan that had done something special—had taken the Hamilton-List model of development, modified it, and applied it super-successfully. Then it was Japan and the Four Tigers that had the secret sauce. But now we have added coastal China; Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand; and—perhaps—Indonesia. It is region-wide, in spite of substantial differences in policies and starting points, with the Philippines being the very odd creature out in the region. This should give us pause, and should give us many clues as to what is essential and what is accidental in the full-convergence process...
I am struck by these two paragraphs in the CRSS article:
"CRSS also does not mean preventing China from purchasing or selling semiconductors on global markets, or from developing its own semiconductor industry in ways that do not violate global trade and investment rules. Weaponizing trade and investment restrictions to thwart China’s long-run semiconductor ambitions will be costly and counterproductive. It will disrupt global supplies, increase semiconductor prices, exacerbate shortages, and strengthen China’s resolve to move faster to achieve autonomy.
A successful CRSS strategy does require the US and its allies to maintain a competitive edge vis-à-vis China, including through coordinated trade and investment policies to contain the mounting security threats that China poses within the semiconductor supply system."
Even if it is not already too late to change "China’s resolve to move faster to achieve autonomy" - and I suspect that it is, given the recent actions of the US, including extraterritorial actions such as the pressure on ASML - the argument here seems incoherent.
If the idea is "to maintain a competitive edge", then this means allowing ("not ... preventing") China to continue to produce inferior semiconductors. Why would anyone think that attempting to consign China to a permanent inferior status would not similarly lead to attempts on the part of China to become more autonomous? (This is, of course, apart from the strange idea that the US believes that it should be able to control the industrial and trade policies of other states.)
This is truly terrible policy for a bunch of reasons.
Current chip production is tapped out; this is as far as VLSI can go. It takes the entire world to support one (1) TSMC. The PRC is spending money like water and they're not getting there and almost certainly cannot get there because the fundamental constraints are creating the community of practice, which requires a certain amount of dumb luck and another certain amount of not being mercilessly authoritarian, something neither the present US nor the PRC are capable of doing in an institutional context.
Important chips are not cutting edge. They're several generations back, they go into things like routers and engine management computers and so on. The US can perfectly well make those if it can manage to do something other than profit maximization. (Ha. Double Ha, even. If you want to regain credible imperial power you're going to have to put a lot of heads on stakes in the process of de-mammonizing.)
Thirdly, the place to put massive public investment (if you can figure out how to do it; that is, spend the public money in a way that is guaranteed to reduce the status, profits, and security of an incumbent oligarch) is into a _successor_ to VLSI. You can do that via something like direct electron beam lithography, you can do that via some other device mechanism -- spintronics is a terrible name but a real thing -- but you really need to do it so as to make the required economic size to make a chip on the order of five million people, not the uncomfortable "north of a billion, maybe everybody" it's currently at if you want any sort of "chip independence" to be possible.
2. This policy is probably very similar to cutting-edge technology policy in the 1930s. Did it help then?
3. Would some sort of reciprocal arrangement where both sides have a permanent and complementary scarcity work as a better deterrent to conflict?
When it comes to security, it goes far beyond chips. Software and pharmaceuticals come to mind. [There have been worrying shortages of generic drugs due to discovered contaminants from both China and India]. Malware is, of course, a constant problem, as well as spyware and a host of other software "diseases" that threaten to cripple our dependence on interconnected computerized systems. It doesn't help that our own security forces, like the FBI, keep trying to undermine general systems' robustness for their own aims.
Given the drift of US politics towards authoritarianism, especially, MAGA, if I was an ally nation, I would be very worried by any attempt by the US to put its own companies in the forefront of technology, for the very same reasons as this article places China. Britain should never have let ARM be owned either by a Chinese company or subsequently, by a US one.
I am struck by these two paragraphs in the CRSS article:
"CRSS also does not mean preventing China from purchasing or selling semiconductors on global markets, or from developing its own semiconductor industry in ways that do not violate global trade and investment rules. Weaponizing trade and investment restrictions to thwart China’s long-run semiconductor ambitions will be costly and counterproductive. It will disrupt global supplies, increase semiconductor prices, exacerbate shortages, and strengthen China’s resolve to move faster to achieve autonomy.
A successful CRSS strategy does require the US and its allies to maintain a competitive edge vis-à-vis China, including through coordinated trade and investment policies to contain the mounting security threats that China poses within the semiconductor supply system."
Even if it is not already too late to change "China’s resolve to move faster to achieve autonomy" - and I suspect that it is, given the recent actions of the US, including extraterritorial actions such as the pressure on ASML - the argument here seems incoherent.
If the idea is "to maintain a competitive edge", then this means allowing ("not ... preventing") China to continue to produce inferior semiconductors. Why would anyone think that attempting to consign China to a permanent inferior status would not similarly lead to attempts on the part of China to become more autonomous? (This is, of course, apart from the strange idea that the US believes that it should be able to control the industrial and trade policies of other states.)
Re the vital chip mission --
This is truly terrible policy for a bunch of reasons.
Current chip production is tapped out; this is as far as VLSI can go. It takes the entire world to support one (1) TSMC. The PRC is spending money like water and they're not getting there and almost certainly cannot get there because the fundamental constraints are creating the community of practice, which requires a certain amount of dumb luck and another certain amount of not being mercilessly authoritarian, something neither the present US nor the PRC are capable of doing in an institutional context.
Important chips are not cutting edge. They're several generations back, they go into things like routers and engine management computers and so on. The US can perfectly well make those if it can manage to do something other than profit maximization. (Ha. Double Ha, even. If you want to regain credible imperial power you're going to have to put a lot of heads on stakes in the process of de-mammonizing.)
Thirdly, the place to put massive public investment (if you can figure out how to do it; that is, spend the public money in a way that is guaranteed to reduce the status, profits, and security of an incumbent oligarch) is into a _successor_ to VLSI. You can do that via something like direct electron beam lithography, you can do that via some other device mechanism -- spintronics is a terrible name but a real thing -- but you really need to do it so as to make the required economic size to make a chip on the order of five million people, not the uncomfortable "north of a billion, maybe everybody" it's currently at if you want any sort of "chip independence" to be possible.
Re: America’s Vital Chip Mission
1. The devil is in the details.
2. This policy is probably very similar to cutting-edge technology policy in the 1930s. Did it help then?
3. Would some sort of reciprocal arrangement where both sides have a permanent and complementary scarcity work as a better deterrent to conflict?
When it comes to security, it goes far beyond chips. Software and pharmaceuticals come to mind. [There have been worrying shortages of generic drugs due to discovered contaminants from both China and India]. Malware is, of course, a constant problem, as well as spyware and a host of other software "diseases" that threaten to cripple our dependence on interconnected computerized systems. It doesn't help that our own security forces, like the FBI, keep trying to undermine general systems' robustness for their own aims.
Given the drift of US politics towards authoritarianism, especially, MAGA, if I was an ally nation, I would be very worried by any attempt by the US to put its own companies in the forefront of technology, for the very same reasons as this article places China. Britain should never have let ARM be owned either by a Chinese company or subsequently, by a US one.