Create a chip ＂iron curtain＂？ The American system won’t work.

It is reported that under the constant pressure from the United States, the United States and Japan are close to reaching an agreement to restrict the export of chip technology to China. The United States has been blocking China’s semiconductor industry for some time, not only making frequent moves against China, but also wooing countries in the semiconductor industry chain to increase export control to China. The practice of the United States is not only an abuse of export control measures, but also a serious departure from free trade and international economic and trade rules.

In recent years, the United States regards the chip industry as a key area of competition with China. The United States has spared no effort to block the development space of China’s chip industry, from wooing allies to jointly contain China to issuing the Chip and Science Act to heavily subsidize local semiconductor manufacturers, from the "core restriction order" against Huawei to a number of control "patches" around the export of advanced semiconductor products and technologies to China, from chips to equipment for producing chips. In the past few months, the U.S. government has sent officials to Japan and the Netherlands several times to discuss how to coordinate export control rules and pressure these allies to follow U.S. policies. However, in today’s highly globalized division of labor in the chip industry, the United States forcibly "decoupled" from China, which not only dealt a heavy blow to local chip manufacturers in the United States, but also seriously threatened the safety of the global semiconductor supply chain.

In April this year, the Federal Reserve Bank of new york, a subsidiary of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States, issued an assessment report, pointing out that export control measures against China "have brought great harm to American enterprises". For example, after losing customers in China, many American companies failed to find new customers and were forced to reduce jobs. For another example, the export control measures to China have caused the stock prices of relevant American suppliers to fall abnormally, and the market value of American enterprises has "evaporated" by 130 billion US dollars in recent years. It is precisely because of foreseeing the "backward force" of American policy that the executives of American chip companies, such as Intel, Qualcomm and NVIDIA, tried to lobby the American government not to cut off contact with China, the largest market, otherwise it would damage the efforts made by the United States in technological innovation and eventually lead to the loss of competitive opportunities in the semiconductor field. The American Semiconductor Industry Association warned that too broad unilateral regulation will only damage the American semiconductor ecosystem and will not promote "national security".

In addition to involving local enterprises in the whirlpool of Sino-US game, the United States has been putting its allies in the geopolitical gap through pressure. The logic of the United States is very simple. To achieve the goal of blocking the development space of China’s science and technology industry, it is necessary for allies to cooperate in unison. However, American allies are well aware of the risks and costs of the "anti-Chinese chip alliance", and blindly following the United States will only bring them pain. In order to avoid becoming a victim of the US strategy to contain China, some countries have tried their best to strike a "balance", and some enterprises have racked their brains to avoid the US ban. Martin Joel Zengpa, a senior researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, an American think tank, wrote that if the United States wants to convince its allies and follow them, it needs to provide more reasonable explanations about "national security" to convince its allies that these measures are not to serve the commercial interests of American enterprises.

The United States has made great efforts to make China’s scientific and technological progress stumble. What it didn’t expect was that the export control to China had an "unexpected counter-effect"-accelerating China’s scientific and technological self-reliance. Huawei, which was "cut off" by the United States, is a typical example of its "upward transformation" under the heavy hammer. Huawei recently released the world’s first three-fold screen mobile phone, which triggered a strong market response. Paul Triolo, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the United States, wrote in the magazine American Affairs that since the United States imposed large-scale export control on China, with the continuous efforts of China enterprises and the attention of the China government, the semiconductor industry in China has undergone positive changes, the industrial structure has become more complex and diverse, and the investment types have become more novel. It is expected that there will be more new technological breakthroughs in the next few years.

The formation and development of global chip industry chain supply chain is the result of the joint action of market law and enterprise choice. For political purposes, artificial restrictions or forced "decoupling" violate the market economy and the principle of fair competition, undermine the international economic and trade order, disrupt the stability of the global industrial chain supply chain, and ultimately harm the interests of the world. In the long run, the United States’ attempt to build an "iron curtain" of chips can’t stop the development of China, and the initiative of the rise and breakthrough of China’s chip industry is in its own hands.