US strategy towards China as of late seems so defensive and even feels a bit desperate. Banning companies from US markets or their ability to purchase things to applying sweeping tariffs. What’s the endgame here? Trying to keep China contained from eclipsing the west perpetually? What about India?
I’m not a fan of the shenanigans China pulls but I legitimately don’t understand what the point is trying to play whack-a-mole against all these Chinese companies
Buy time for AGI hailmary I suppose. Scifi hypothetical is the ~5-10 years it would take for PRC to potentially reach parity with western semi that AI would grant US strategic take off where gap can't be closed - a fight for the entire light cone. Except if PRC keeps a second mover advantage to a few years they still have massively robust supply chains to apply software AI to transform physical atoms because unlikely US AGI will suddenly build decades worth of industrial supply chains unless US AGI goes straight for grey goo. Nevermind PRC still in US telcoms and likely infiltrated every strategic AI company that matters, and if existential AGI ever on the horizon, they can smash red button to cut off 90% of advanced semi from TW. India still in the containable window, they'll get there eventually but IMO both US + PRC will take opportunity to undermine.
It seems irrational because your framing is wrong here. The reason these measures seem random and poorly thought through is because it’s only in the last ~10 years that the US has even started paying attention to the supposed competition from China. If it was actually being taken seriously, the level of government and industry action would look similar to the Cold War. We aren’t even at 1% of that yet, and so the actions now are largely disorganized, unhurried, and “whack a mole.”
> US strategy towards China as of late seems so defensive and even feels a bit desperate
One funny reading that's been gaining traction among Chinese netizens over the last few years has been likening the US to the Trisolarians in Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem, trying to undermine science while becoming increasingly chaotic and agressive at home.
I really hope apps like RedNote gain a bit of traction so there's more cultural exchange and people get a bit of an idea of how all of this is being perceived in China. There was also this whole meme last year of Trump as "建国同志", basically "Comrade Nation Builder", the joke being that the nation he's building is China because he's doing more to unify their efforts than the government ever could.
When a vision for a better future is foreclosed, so the option of rising to meet a challenge is off the table, the only thing you can do is stop yourself from looking like a loser is to eliminate the challenge altogether.
You are right on the money, its like a dying empire's last gasp, or when kids are playing hide-and-seek and one kids is found and says, "I wasn't playing anyway!"
China (Tiawan) is doing fine in chip manufacturing, pretending to cut them off just hastens the US downfall.
Yes it seems weak, but to be fair, I don’t anticipate a US downfall (which I suppose can be interpreted many ways) given its immense size, military, US dollar everywhere. Not without taking down the rest of the world with it.
Historically China and India were economic powerhouses for the past thousand years prior to the industrial age. The trend seems to be that they will return to that position given their gains over the past couple of decades. That seems impossible for the US to stop without waging a complete Cold War or worse. Maybe that’s the direction we’re headed
That sounds like the "China can only produce cheap knockoffs, they can't produce anything new" from the early 2000s, or the "Japan is never going to catch up with American chipmakers" of the 1960s-1970s.
Indian people aren't stupid. There's literally a billion of them, and we've spend the last twenty years outsourcing an awful lot of work to them. If you don't see them as a potential future threat, you have already lost.
There's an inherent contradiction in the current US approach to China. On one hand, China has developed an unparalleled manufacturing ecosystem, particularly evident in places like Shenzhen, where the physical proximity of component manufacturers creates an efficiency that's nearly impossible to replicate elsewhere. The iPhone supply chain is a prime example of this integrated network, where design issues can be resolved through direct factory-to-factory collaboration within hours.
The attempt to slow China's AI development through tariffs and trade restrictions seems misguided for two key reasons. First, as we've seen with Russia, trade restrictions often just lead to the development of alternative supply routes through intermediary countries rather than true isolation.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, restrictions may actually accelerate Chinese innovation. The "necessity is the mother of invention" principle suggests that trade barriers could push Chinese AI companies to develop novel solutions and optimizations, potentially making them more competitive in the global AI race, not less. This is particularly relevant in the context of large language models, where alternative approaches might emerge from working under constraints.
The current situation indeed resembles a Sputnik moment, but the strategy of using trade barriers might be counterproductive to maintaining technological leadership.
"To be clear, the goal here is not to deny China or any other authoritarian country the immense benefits in science, medicine, quality of life, and so on that come from very powerful AI systems. Everyone should be able to benefit from AI. The goal is to prevent them from gaining military dominance.”
A moralizing statement that weasels out of the implication.
This would be a more straightforward way to say it: Export restrictions are necessary to prevent China from gaining military dominance, even if those restrictions deny China the immense benefits in science, medicine, quality of life, and so on that come from very powerful AI systems.
U.S. even failed on military too as China recently demostrated their 6th-gen fighters, i.e. their own NGAD[1], while U.S. has paused the NGAD development.
Arrogance is the biggest enemy of U.S., not China.
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I’m not a fan of the shenanigans China pulls but I legitimately don’t understand what the point is trying to play whack-a-mole against all these Chinese companies
One funny reading that's been gaining traction among Chinese netizens over the last few years has been likening the US to the Trisolarians in Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem, trying to undermine science while becoming increasingly chaotic and agressive at home.
I really hope apps like RedNote gain a bit of traction so there's more cultural exchange and people get a bit of an idea of how all of this is being perceived in China. There was also this whole meme last year of Trump as "建国同志", basically "Comrade Nation Builder", the joke being that the nation he's building is China because he's doing more to unify their efforts than the government ever could.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/25/comrade-nation-buil...
China (Tiawan) is doing fine in chip manufacturing, pretending to cut them off just hastens the US downfall.
Historically China and India were economic powerhouses for the past thousand years prior to the industrial age. The trend seems to be that they will return to that position given their gains over the past couple of decades. That seems impossible for the US to stop without waging a complete Cold War or worse. Maybe that’s the direction we’re headed
Indian people aren't stupid. There's literally a billion of them, and we've spend the last twenty years outsourcing an awful lot of work to them. If you don't see them as a potential future threat, you have already lost.
Not from a GDP growth perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_largest_h...
They’ve been climbing each year, ranked 4th right behind Japan
They’ve also been climbing substantially in energy use: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42295
Historically a proxy for economic growth
The attempt to slow China's AI development through tariffs and trade restrictions seems misguided for two key reasons. First, as we've seen with Russia, trade restrictions often just lead to the development of alternative supply routes through intermediary countries rather than true isolation.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, restrictions may actually accelerate Chinese innovation. The "necessity is the mother of invention" principle suggests that trade barriers could push Chinese AI companies to develop novel solutions and optimizations, potentially making them more competitive in the global AI race, not less. This is particularly relevant in the context of large language models, where alternative approaches might emerge from working under constraints.
The current situation indeed resembles a Sputnik moment, but the strategy of using trade barriers might be counterproductive to maintaining technological leadership.
"To be clear, the goal here is not to deny China or any other authoritarian country the immense benefits in science, medicine, quality of life, and so on that come from very powerful AI systems. Everyone should be able to benefit from AI. The goal is to prevent them from gaining military dominance.”
A moralizing statement that weasels out of the implication.
This would be a more straightforward way to say it: Export restrictions are necessary to prevent China from gaining military dominance, even if those restrictions deny China the immense benefits in science, medicine, quality of life, and so on that come from very powerful AI systems.
Arrogance is the biggest enemy of U.S., not China.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3293762/why...
Of course they don't want to deny others the benefit of anything... as long as they buy from US companies or do not threaten US dominance.
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