Good post, but disagree on the last bit. China has been building alternatives to the U.S. model for a reason — they can offer their services to other countries alienated by the U.S. system (remaining AES countries, the Global South) and anyone else who sees the obvious writing on the wall and is in a position where they don’t have to continue bowing down to their dying master
Exactly. I don’t buy into the pessimism because China has been building its own alternatives to Amazon and Google for precisely such a scenario. And yes, the West may not adopt them but the world is bigger than just this increasingly insular and self-isolated West, and the rest of the world will get the best of both worlds. The global south will have no issues using Chinese platforms in parallel with Western platforms, and eventually, hopefully, even making their own. That is just one of the many benefits of multipolarity.
I don’t understand this analysis. Surely it would be easier for the Americans to control and damage the Chinese economy if Xi Jinping and Chinese business leaders were typing out emails and memos on backdoored Microsoft software or iPhones. Forcing Huawei to develop their own tech via hostility means that the Chinese market is lost forever and now the American security apparatus has to deal with an opaque ecosystem they can’t backdoor.
I’ve heard people say that the October Hamas attacks on Israel were so surprising because they were planned entirely via Chinese tech and therefore was not picked up by Zionist elint. I don’t necessarily think that’s true or even the only reason, but it’s not an implausible example of how forcing China to make its own systems is a huge own goal.
All this hostility has just made China more and more self sufficient. I just don’t see how that gives the US more leverage than a China which is completely dependent on Western tech.
The result is that Huawei displaces all its domestic competitors within China, but the other companies are now also taking over Huawei’s share in the global market.
Other Chinese companies aren’t able to produce what Huawei is making, so what this means is that the largest Chinese domestic buyers (the military, the bureaucracy, the academy) are less and less dependent on international trade to function, making the Chinese state more resilient along multiple dimensions specifically because Huawei is building advanced tech.
The US can damage China’s economy as long as China continues to stay as a net exporter country
And it will essentially ALWAYS be a net exporter in pure dollar values because it has the second largest population in the world. It will always need to import low cost commodities like food and it will always be able to outproduce everyone on high priced commodities like electronics. There is really no risk of China being a net importer in the next century.
The vast majority of the businesses around the world are too deeply tied to the US controlled infrastructures like Amazon/Google
I think you overstate this. There are plenty of companies that use those infrastructures purely for commodity virtualization and seamlessly move been cloud providers based entirely on price, not on technological features. Then there’s the massive amount of infrastructure that is private and not on the cloud at all. They’re already locked in to domestic technology because American companies like IBM, EMC, and Oracle trapped them decades ago. Those people were never going to move their workloads to Chinese infrastructure, but if they have a presence in China they are absolutely going to buy Chinese hardware to build their new private infrastructure.
There are a set of companies that are on USA-based public cloud providers that are serving USA-based customers and they would never want to be on Chinese-located tech because it’s too far from their markets. Then there’s a set of companies on USA-based public cloud providers that serve AsiaPac and use AWS/Google/Microsoft because those companies have physical presence in China. China has the power to influence exactly how those data centers work and in fact many of those data centers are already contract data centers meaning they are Chinese companies under the hood providing the facilities for USA companies for their presence in AsiaPac.
In short, the number of computing dollars that could go to China but won’t because of the USA is going to be very small relative to the total market size. The much larger dollar values are in which chips get used where.
