Lol, the cope is really getting out of hand. First it was “China can’t domestically produce high end chips”, now the talking point is “ok maybe they can but only cause they violated sanctions”. Do they realize this is an admission that a) their sanctions aren’t working, and b) that they have nothing to do with any “national security” but simply with a futile attempt to hamper a competitor nation’s technological development because their own industries can’t handle competing on an even playing ground.
Not that we as communists give a single shit about “free market competition”, there is nothing wrong with a weaker nation using protectionist measures (although we must be clear about the fact that sanctions are not protectionism, they are the polar opposite, they are aggressive economic hybrid warfare) to prevent a stronger one overrunning their economy, but it shows the hypocrisy of their own neoliberal “free trade” mantra.
It can quickly become a national security concern when you realize the people making the chips have total control over the systems built with them. Modern computing is built around the idea of “trusted computing” where certain pieces of hardware control the root of trust. There’s also plenty of issues with backdoors (lookup intel ME if you’re not familiar). The ability for the US to maintain its backdoors into foreign computing systems and preventing China from gaining that ability is the same cold war crap but in the cyber rather than the economic domain.
Not that we as communists give a single shit about “free market competition”, there is nothing wrong with a weaker nation using protectionist measures (although we must be clear about the fact that sanctions are not protectionism, they are the polar opposite, they are aggressive economic hybrid warfare) to prevent a stronger one overrunning their economy, but it shows the hypocrisy of their own neoliberal “free trade” mantra.
My understanding is that the “free market” is to prevent foreign nations from developing their economies by means of import-substitution industrialization, for the sake of domestic monopolies taking over the foreign nations’ economies, like a parasite, and turning them into rent-extracting hosts.
In that case, it’s in the interests of all peoples of the globe to reject this form of neo-colonialism—not just communists.
You’re right but unfortunately it doesn’t matter. The phrasing makes it SEEM like China did something bad, and that’s the deepest most people who come across this headline will ever think about it. The goal is to make westerners ever so slightly more sympathetic towards aggression against the Chinese people, and these misleading or outright false articles are terribly effective.
