In this crazy capitalist world of drive for domination, war is the main tool. In today's hi-tech world there are more than one way of waging war. Today we have U$A and NATO's proxy war in Ukraine, fought with Western weaponry but uses Ukrainian blood. However, the U$A's war against China takes a different shape, it is a sanctions war being fought to try to strangle China's further advances in the hi-tech world and so destroy its economy.
An interesting article from Struggle-La-Lucha.
The July 12 New York Times Magazine headlined: “‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China.”
The report is about the October 2022 “export controls” against China:
“Last October, the United States Bureau of Industry and Security issued a document that — underneath its 139 pages of dense bureaucratic jargon and minute technical detail — amounted to a declaration of economic war on China. …
“The Oct. 7 controls essentially seek to eradicate, root and branch, China’s entire ecosystem of advanced technology. ‘The new policy embodied in Oct. 7 is: Not only are we not going to allow China to progress any further technologically, we are going to actively reverse their current state of the art,’ [Gregory] Allen [of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington] says. C.J. Muse, a senior semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI, put it this way: ‘If you’d told me about these rules five years ago, I would’ve told you that’s an act of war — we’d have to be at war.’”
The U.S. export controls (the act of war) on computer chips aim to cripple China’s ability to produce or purchase high-end chips, which are crucial for the development of advanced technologies such as supercomputers and artificial intelligence (AI). Some call this a Silicon Curtain in the New Cold War against China. The U.S. controls (again, an act of war) are not narrowly targeted at curbing Chinese military development, as claimed by the Biden administration. On her recent visit to China, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seemed openly insincere when she tried to say the controls were not aimed at the broader economy. China’s Premier Li Qiang, who met Yellen, told her that she was “overstretching.”
The export controls are broad. As the New York Times reports, they seek to undermine China’s entire ecosystem of advanced technology, including its AI industry. The semiconductor industry is seen as a means to achieve this goal.
The semiconductor industry is a global industry that the U.S. has dominated and controlled, as U.S. Big Oil has dominated the global energy industry.
The Pentagon’s semiconductor project
The semiconductor industry began as a project of the Pentagon’s Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research Network (STARnet), part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The industry in the U.S. was and is, to this day, heavily financed by the Pentagon and the U.S. government.
The CHIPS Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in August 2022, pumped an additional $280 billion in new funding for the research and manufacture of semiconductors in the U.S. That was followed by a DARPA announcement in January 2023 that it was putting almost half a billion dollars into a project to help advance the semiconductor industry in the U.S. None of this, by the way, was created or developed by any capitalist entrepreneur. Capitalism does not create anything on its own; it just finds a way to exploit new technology to make a profit. And many of the biggest, highest profit-making capitalist industries were created and funded by the government in various ways, including most of the technology industry, the internet, the pharmaceutical industry, the automobile industry, and even Big Oil.
The semiconductor industry is a knowledge-intensive industry. It is built on shared knowledge and resources. Initially, semiconductor companies were built on open innovation. Because of its complexity, development, and production required the collaboration of research centers, universities, scientists, engineers, and many others to develop the techniques and methodologies required. The pace of innovation in the semiconductor industry has been incredibly rapid. New chip designs are constantly being developed, and the capabilities of chips are constantly increasing. This is due to a number of factors, including:
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