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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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otoh they had a coordination problem and the idiot ``us`` solved it for them

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 started these investments long before Trump was on the radar, during later Bush and early Obama. They might have upped it from $10 billion to $20 billion, but the ball was already rolling in 2017.

No, you are wrong. Without the blacklisting and export bans the DUV machine in the article would not exist today.

Absolutely and I'm shocked how unaware people are about this issue. This was massive news. China went from self sufficiency on chips of about 10% after decades to over 33% self sufficiency in just a few years after Trump's trade war of 2017/2018 (which Biden did not back down from and Trump only ramped up in his second term)

And its not just chips. It was seen as a total affront of china moving up the tech value chain. They ramped up EVs, clean energy, industrial software, robotics, etc. The Chinese economy of 2017 is radically different from the Chinese economy economy today.

agree. what people dont understand is that the blacklisting is what created motivation for investing capital, manpower and years of time into these companies, or initiatives inside existing companies. most of this would have never gotten off the ground without the incentive they created.

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