Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
That was very well said and true. Thank you for laying it out.
Unfortunately, TMay cannot and will not let himself see that. To him: the U.S. can do nothing wrong and China can do nothing right. He needs that belief to stay unshakably intact to support his hatred of that country.
Europe will do their best to work with Biden. But they will hedge all their agreements and deals with us knowing that Trump and his 'merica first bullshit can return at almost anytime. And so far Biden has given China no reason to not cut us out of the technological loop.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
That was very well said and true. Thank you for laying it out.
Unfortunately, TMay cannot and will not let himself see that. To him: the U.S. can do nothing wrong and China can do nothing right. He needs that belief to stay unshakably intact to support his hatred of that country.
Europe will do their best to work with Biden. But they will hedge all their agreements and deals with us knowing that Trump and his 'merica first bullshit can return at almost anytime. And so far Biden has given China no reason to not cut us out of the technological loop.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
At least you realize that he's coming from the same place Trump did: Start with the agenda (attack/hate/destroy) and then fill in whatever "facts" (real or otherwise, relevant or not) that might support that agenda.
One can "prove" that the sun rises in west with that kind of logic.
FauxNews perfected the technique. Now others seem to think its legitimate. It's not.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
Huawei's mistake was allowing the company to become China's National Champion, and also, being involved in China's mercantilist policies, all while involved in some shady deals with known terrorist countries, in a world already concerned about the national security aspects of telecom infrastructure. There's also that surveillance technology that they were connected with in the Xinjiang region, that doesn't help them.
It was obvious to the Trump administration that Huawei would make a useful pressure point, and they certainly did so. They might as well have driven a stake through Huawei's heart.
Whatever happened to Huawei is of no concern to me today, but China's militarization does concern me, and importantly, a lot of other countries are also concerned. That's why Huawei is failing in the West; too many national security concerns.
Now Xiamoi and Oppo are feeding off of Huawei's corpse in the smartphone market.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
But at least I'm not emotionally invested in a Chinese company like AvonB7 is, and it's not like the PRC doesn't do the same shit to other countries for political reasons.
It also appears that you can't let it go either, constantly having some lame response about me, not about what what I've posted. But no matter, it's pretty apparent that I have a better idea of what's going on wrt China foreign policy and militarization than either of you two yahoo's do. Go have a good cry together.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
But at least I'm not emotionally invested in a Chinese company like AvonB7 is, and it's not like the PRC doesn't do the same shit to other countries for political reasons.
It also appears that you can't let it go either, constantly having some lame response about me, not about what what I've posted. But no matter, it's pretty apparent that I have a better idea of what's going on wrt China foreign policy and militarization than either of you two yahoo's do. Go have a good cry together.
So you blame Avon for the explosion of your obsessive hatred? Typical. But sad.
Sorry TMay, because you have been taught to hate something or somebody and you look for ways to justify your hate does not make THEM evil.
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
But at least I'm not emotionally invested in a Chinese company like AvonB7 is, and it's not like the PRC doesn't do the same shit to other countries for political reasons.
It also appears that you can't let it go either, constantly having some lame response about me, not about what what I've posted. But no matter, it's pretty apparent that I have a better idea of what's going on wrt China foreign policy and militarization than either of you two yahoo's do. Go have a good cry together.
So you blame Avon for the explosion of your obsessive hatred? Typical. But sad.
Sorry TMay, because you have been taught to hate something or somebody and you look for ways to justify your hate does not make THEM evil.
When AvonB7 states that he has no bias, and yet has demonstrates a huge emotional attachment to Huawei since he has been posting at AI, what else am I to think? He doesn't even attempt to hide that. Yet you and he are quick to state how biased everyone else is.
More to the point, you lecturing me about "hate" is. at the least, incredibly ironic, since my "hate" is against an oppressive authoritarian government, a government that you openly side with when they are accused of human rights violations. A country that you openly support in crushing democracies in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Yet you use "hate" against anyone you disagree with like people use condiments, without thought or consequence.
What's up with that? Am I to believe that you are an avowed Communist living in a our U.S. democracy? Are you so concerned about the so called "hegemony" of the U.S. and the West that you would sell your soul to Communism?
That's how you come across. Maybe that is how you are.
I will note that U.S. Navy's "hegemony" has provided the backbone of freedom of navigation since WWII, and that is why there is reliable global trade. Do you really think that the China's PLAN would do the same?
I'm pleased the at the EU is acting to support Human Rights;
BEIJING (AP) — China on Friday rejected European Parliament demands that it lift sanctions against European Union legislators in order to save a trade deal between the two sides.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the sanctions were justified and demanded that the European side “immediately stop interfering in China’s internal affairs (and) abandon its confrontational approach.”
“The unreasonable sanctions imposed by the EU have led to difficulties in China-EU relations. That is what China does not want to see, and the responsibility does not lie with the Chinese side,” Zhao said at a daily briefing.
The European Parliament warned China on Thursday it won’t ratify a long-awaited business investment deal as long as sanctions against European Union legislators remain in place.
China made its sanctions move after the EU, Britain, Canad<
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
But at least I'm not emotionally invested in a Chinese company like AvonB7 is, and it's not like the PRC doesn't do the same shit to other countries for political reasons.
It also appears that you can't let it go either, constantly having some lame response about me, not about what what I've posted. But no matter, it's pretty apparent that I have a better idea of what's going on wrt China foreign policy and militarization than either of you two yahoo's do. Go have a good cry together.
So you blame Avon for the explosion of your obsessive hatred? Typical. But sad.
Sorry TMay, because you have been taught to hate something or somebody and you look for ways to justify your hate does not make THEM evil.
When AvonB7 states that he has no bias, and yet has demonstrates a huge emotional attachment to Huawei since he has been posting at AI, what else am I to think? He doesn't even attempt to hide that. Yet you and he are quick to state how biased everyone else is.
More to the point, you lecturing me about "hate" is. at the least, incredibly ironic, since my "hate" is against an oppressive authoritarian government, a government that you openly side with when they are accused of human rights violations. A country that you openly support in crushing democracies in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Yet you use "hate" against anyone you disagree with like people use condiments, without thought or consequence.
What's up with that? Am I to believe that you are an avowed Communist living in a our U.S. democracy? Are you so concerned about the so called "hegemony" of the U.S. and the West that you would sell your soul to Communism?
That's how you come across. Maybe that is how you are.
I will note that U.S. Navy's "hegemony" has provided the backbone of freedom of navigation since WWII, and that is why there is reliable global trade. Do you really think that the China's PLAN would do the same?
I'm pleased the at the EU is acting to support Human Rights;
BEIJING (AP) — China on Friday rejected European Parliament demands that it lift sanctions against European Union legislators in order to save a trade deal between the two sides.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the sanctions were justified and demanded that the European side “immediately stop interfering in China’s internal affairs (and) abandon its confrontational approach.”
“The unreasonable sanctions imposed by the EU have led to difficulties in China-EU relations. That is what China does not want to see, and the responsibility does not lie with the Chinese side,” Zhao said at a daily briefing.
The European Parliament warned China on Thursday it won’t ratify a long-awaited business investment deal as long as sanction
Here we go again. Selling a boatload of phones at razor-thin margins versus Apple selling less phones at a profit is not a success.
I'd rather sell a million phones with a 30% profit, than sell 100 million phones at 1% profit. Does this really have to be rehashed again?
As a business person you may want that but why on earth would you want that as a consumer?
Especially when most of Xiaomi's high end products are providing in demand phones and a plethora of services and thousands of ecosystem products offered through partners. Even if they do so on 'razor thin' phone margins.
Most of the other big Chinese brands also offer great phones too, along with huge ecosystems.
The issue has been expansion outside China. Until recently it was Huawei which ruled the roost outside China but for the last three years both Oppo and Xiaomi have been expanding rapidly in Europe. So much that Xiaomi is now becoming a go-to brand here and the Chinese brands are bringing more and more of their ecosystem partner products to the rest of the world.
Apple literally sat on most of its money for a decade. It really didn't do much with it. I'd rather they simply charged me less, which ironically, is what they've been doing over the last few years on many models which, ironically again, they needed to do as part of efforts to stimulate demand.
And let's not forget, every sale to Xiaomi means one less potential sale to Apple.
Are you trying to equate Samsung's or Xiami's ecosystem to that of Apple?
I think they could better be compared to that of Windows: open architecture that has its advantages but also disadvantages such as less stability and less security and privacy.
But, in the end, like HP or Lenovo, they are selling a chunk of hardware, not a complete, integrated package of hardware, software and services.
(And, by that, I am not disparaging either one: both have advantages and disadvantages. They are just different approaches.)
No. I'm saying there is a business plan here and it works. In terms of hardware peripherals it knocks Apple out of the park but they have a services branch too.
Historically it has been China that has seen most of that market drive but now, they are pushing things in Europe too.
Just today, on my way into Barcelona, I saw two huge billboard ads announcing the arrival of Midea in Spain. So, after HiSense and Haier, Midea is breaking into Europe as well. After announcing that almost all of its products will support HarmonyOS.
Xiaomi shouldn't be judged solely on its phone margins. They have a bigger plan in place. No one knows exactly how it will play out in the long term but there is method to the madness.
Huawei died; Xiaomi replaced Huawei.
Growth beyond that, not so much.
Huawei is anything but dead. It is re-gearing on literally every front. And all of them with the ultimate goal of eliminating US technology from its supply chains.
Honor is back up and running as an independent company and will eventually return to Huawei.
Huawei is pushing a ton of non phone hardware into the CE market.
This year it is forecast to increase its 5G base station share worldwide.
It is moving fast in the automobile market with hardware and self driving tech.
It is breaking records in AI.
It is pushing ahead with its data centre and solar energy divisions.
HarmonyOS 3 will be revealed next month
Hisilicon is increasing its workforce and Huawei has been investing aggressively in chip fabrication technology since 2019.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Dead, you say?
You know that I am speaking of phones, but thanks for playing;
Huawei has even struggled in China, its home market. "One-time market leader Huawei saw its share decline to 10% in Q2 2021 from 32% in Q2 2020," wrote analyst Ethan Qi of Counterpoint Research on the firm's website. "Vivo and OPPO now lead the market with 23% and 21% shares, respectively, followed by Xiaomi and Apple. All leading OEMs benefited from Huawei's decline and grew their market shares."
According to reports from DigiTimes (1,2), “The mounting US trade sanctions are driving HiSilicon to the brink and many engineers have left the Huawei IC design arm’s team in Taiwan.”This will not just affect the company’s operations, but may also hamper its plans for the future. Another report also revealed that Huawei is planning on building its own 45nm fabs for the severely outdated 45nm chips.
How about looking at what the company has stated - recently - instead of what DigiTimes speculated on a year ago?
The most recent fabrication nodes are of zero use to over 90% of the world's needs. In fact it is in nobody's interest to use them outside of very limited use cases. It wouldn't make economic sense.
Take a peek at HiSilicon's product catalog and you'll see why they employ 7,000 people.
Kirin isn't everything at HiSilicon and Kirin isn't dead either. If you believe the rumours you might even see a Samsung fabbed new Kirin chip next year.
And this just fresh out of the HiSilicon gate. Already 100% Chinese.
You didn't say you were talking about Huawei's phone business. You said Huawei.
It doesn't matter, though because Huawei's phone business isn't dead either. It is being regeared but it won't be instant. However, it won't take years either. It is using MediaTek and QC chipsets (just as it always has!). The difference being that a few years ago they were using less and less processors from them and now they will use more until the re-gearing process is finished.
Honor was spun off. If you are a betting man, put a bet on Honor returning to the Huawei fold as soon as it reaches processor independence.
In the meantime tablets, watches, fitness bands, earbuds, sound equipment, smartscreens, monitors, PCs, laptops etc are being brought to market. That's just CE.
With China being the biggest user of processors, what do you think will happen once they can satisfy there own needs and take a pass on US options? What will happen then?
Remember that both ASML and TSMC have lost billions in trade due to extraterritorial US 'sanctions'. They are not happy and are making their discontent known.
The Chinese handset manufacturers 'punished' Qualcomm by ordering more chips from MediaTek which in turn took it to the number one position worldwide.
MediaTek is now moving into the ultra premium band.
Samsung is also moving up a gear.
ASML and TSMC haven't lost billions. They still have more demand than they can satisfy, and its all outside of China.
ASML shouldn’t be singled out as the only semiconductor company to be restricted. If the US wants to cut off China, at the very least, ban American technology too.
Finally, ASML finds itself in the eye of a geopolitical battle. It was just a matter of time, once the Trump administration started to put the squeeze on China. The US is hell-bent on stopping, or at the very least slowing down, the Chinese advance on the world stage. Everything was fine as long as China was manufacturing the easy stuff, but now that it starts posing a threat – economically, technologically and therefore ultimately militarily – to the American hegemony, the fight is on.
According to the reports, initially by Nikkei Asian Review and more recently by Reuters, US pressure led the Dutch government to withhold the license required for ASML to ship an EUV scanner to a Chinese customer. This is almost certainly SMIC, China’s most advanced semiconductor company. At this point, the foundry has no need for EUV in manufacturing. But, the same way Intel, TSMC and Samsung had machines to play with years before they even considered moving EUV into production, SMIC obviously will require some time to learn the tricks of the trade.
I wouldn’t be so sure, however, that it was just US pressure that put SMIC’s order on hold. The Dutch government presented its own China strategy right before ASML’s export license wasn’t renewed. Called ‘A new balance’, it marks a new way of weighing national interests. Basically, short-term commercial interests are no longer drowning out all the other ones. Eyes have been opened to China keenly taking advantage of the possibilities that open, Western economies offer, while not returning the favor at home. The Dutch government acknowledges this asymmetry is both an economic and a national security threat.
The document specifically mentions semiconductors and lithography as powering technological revolutions, which China intends to leverage to move up in the world. Shattering the previously widely held assumption that China would never be able to catch up to the West, or if it did, it would be to our advantage too – the government no longer considers China’s ascension on the world stage necessarily a good thing. Just as technology can change our future, so can a more powerful China.
So, indeed, if the US government has been pressuring the Dutch, it might not have had to press all that hard. It’s not likely that the whole strategy was written merely to appease US wishes, either. Though only the US pursues an aggressive course of action, most Western countries have adopted a more stern stance on China in recent years. The US did – even before the stable genius became president.
There’s much to be said for the Netherlands and Europe rethinking their approach to China, but the US’ pursuit of global dominance isn’t our fight. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that ASML is a very convenient target for the Trump administration. Curtailing the company will have next to no impact domestically, unlike when chip sales to ZTE were temporarily banned. So what about, say, Applied Materials? Will its sales be restricted as well? That company wants as much a piece of the action in booming China as ASML does. What about Intel? Surely its chips can be used to power advanced weaponry.
ASML’s technology is of exceptional strategic importance, though. Cutting off the Chinese from EUV will leave them forever stuck at 7-ish nanometer process technology, preserving the country’s dependence on imports for the most advanced semiconductor technology. To cut it off completely, however, one would have to convince TSMC to stop supplying the mainland (the Taiwanese foundry recently shipped the first EUV-made chips to Huawei).
Still, it doesn’t seem fair to single out ASML when loads of US tech companies are allowed to continue doing business there. So, unless the Dutch government itself feels it would be wise to cut off China from EUV or use it as leverage in dealings with China, it shouldn’t ban the export. The sad reality of it, of course, is that if the US would really flex its muscles on the issue, the Netherlands would most likely cave.
Oh, and the Kirin 9000 from Samsung, rumored to be in production back in March, crickets...
Get you story straight about Mediatek, which is also a Taiwanese company;
Huawei's affiliated HiSilicon attempted to challenge MediaTek's leading position, only to fail in the wake of the US-China trade war. MediaTek has benefited from Huawei's woes, and Huawei, once the second largest customer of TSMC and the third largest semiconductor buyer in the world, has gone back to square one, and started making changes.
Demand for processors right now is outstripping supply pretty much across the board. That isn't the point. ASML and TSMC want to do business with Chinese companies and both CEOs have come out and said so. And very directly. The ASML CEO made it crystal clear that the US approach would not work.
TSMC now has problems recruiting tech staff as China pumps up its efforts for semiconductor self sufficiency. TSMC is being subjected to an extraterritorial double whammy. They have lost billions in not being able to trade with Huawei and now have the absolute definite realisation of Huawei becoming a direct competitor down the line. It's now not a case of 'if' but 'when'. And through no fault of their own.
The Dutch government had no autonomous role in impeding the SMIC deal. It had been signed off by ASML without government intervention until the US stepped up pressure. In fact, it seems the machinery will be delivered anyway in the not too distant future.
The world (perhaps excepting the US) knows full well that China's ultimate goal is the post silicon semiconductor age and there is nothing that can be done to stop that.
The Dutch know full well that business with China is not 'short term gain'. It is absolutely necessary because if the Chinese stop doing business with ASML permanently, it won't be a pretty sight.
As for Samsung and Kirin, there may well be things we aren't aware of yet:
My link disagrees with your post, and your link doesn't actually make sense. If China has etching technology to 5nm, why would they not use it for their own production at SMIC?
Perhaps it is a temporal issue with ASML equipment bans, given that Denmark changed its policies late in the process. Countries around the world are tiring of the PRC's bullying and mercantilism. That is a fact.
I really don't care much what China comes up with internally, but given their militarism, especially against Taiwan, I'm happy to see advanced Western technology barred from sale to the PRC, and that's a trend that's accelerating.
GeorgeBMac accused me of being an "anti Communist"; do you agree with him? Seems odd on his part, living in the U.S.
I see myself as an anti-authoritarian, and the covers the PRC, as well as many other countries.
an example of the PRC's economic bullying tactics...
China’s surprise ban on pineapple imports from Taiwan five months ago was widely viewed as an attempt to undermine President Tsai Ing-wen’s standing with a political constituency. Trade data show the move has produced anything but the desired effect.
First-half numbers collected by Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture show growers of the fruit on the island have fared better since China blocked imports starting March 1, as sympathetic Japanese shoppers stepped in to provide support. Shipments to Japan surged more than eightfold to 16,556 tons in the four months through June from a year ago. A domestic campaign to drum up demand also helped.
The helping hand from Japanese importers has come as a pleasant surprise for Taiwan’s rattled farmers who were bracing for a plunge in prices following the move by China, which termed it as a normal precaution to protect biosecurity. The spiky fruit is among a long list of products from Australian wine to coal and lobster China has targeted for sanctions to help gain leverage in trade disputes.
“The bleeding was stopped before it even began,” said Chen Li-i, an official at the Council of Agriculture in Taipei.
Japan has now replaced China as the major overseas destination for Taiwan’s pineapples. While it’s unclear how long the ban will last -- the shift may well reverse once the restrictions are lifted -- the humble tropical fruit has become an unlikely symbol of defiance in the region’s geopolitical intrigues. Amid all the sabre-rattling by Beijing, Japan and the island democracy have expressed a broad desire to forge closer ties. Leaders in Tokyo see their own security directly linked to that of Taiwan, which China asserts is its territory.
Pineapples are an important source of income for farmers in central and southern Taiwan. Around 11% of the tropical fruit harvested in Taiwan are sold overseas. Until the ban, they were almost entirely shipped to China.
The etching process is simply one of many steps in processor fabrication. The point was that this technology from AMEC does not use US IP and is already being used for volume production in tier 1 settings. That is the trend that will be followed.
There are currently plans for 30 new fabs in China (more than any other country). 13 of those 30 are destined for processor development. The others are destined for development of the remaining semiconductor branches. These are what we know about. I'm sure there are other advances in technology that are brewing and specifically in the field of lithography that are currently under wraps.
By reading between the lines on various comments from executives at Huawei and HiSilicon, three years is the time frame they seem to be working on to be entirely self sufficient.
In fact, the supply of one specific area within the 5G handset market that currently prevents Huawei from shipping 5G in its new phones will be resolved next year by home-grown technology. You can guess which country is going to lose out (again!) in that area and see its entire supply chain negatively impacted.
Of course no one knows for sure how long it will take Chinese companies to self sufficiently get below 5nm but it will be long before most people think.
I don't know what you 'are' or what you 'aren't' but you are blinded by bias when it comes to your stance on China. That impacts your credibility.
You might see the same if you looked in a mirror, but my bias is the result of China's Militarization, and what the result of that will be.
Maybe China will catch up to the West sooner than predicted. but that just means more threats to the West, not just more competition.
I look in the mirror and see no bias.
I comment on what I know. Most of it is supported by the relevant links.
I know there is literally nothing to support US claims on Huawei. As of course there is nothing to support its prohibition of handset sales either in the US. The Meng extradition case is a farce and the latest documentation has proved that beyond a shadow of doubt.
Instead of playing by established rules, the US chose to try and wreck the entire system. It was a protectionist move in an absurd attempt to artificially maintain its technology lead.
The US has swung wildly from one damaging plan to another, desperate to stop China matching it in technology or, gasp, getting ahead of it.
Huawei offered to licence everything (source code included) to a US entity. Things don't come any more transparent than that. Of course the offer was rejected because the whole reason for the current situation really has nothing to do with the claims.
It speaks of 'clean' networks while having been exposed time and time again as having some of the dirtiest networks out there.
It has been caught time and time again flouting its own promises on not spying on allies. It has lost the trust of its allies. 'America First' was the claim.
Allies would be bullied, bludgeoned and bought if necessary.
The rest of the world took note and is reacting.
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that has led blocs like the EU to seek technological independence. Of course, China has been left with no alternative but to completely sever technology connections with the US on key technologies. The US quite literally pulled the rug out from under their feet and to a lesser degree did the same with anyone from anywhere willing to do business with China.
It literally insists that you get 'permission' from Uncle Sam before you can do business with certain companies. That's right, sovereign states have to get permission just because US technology may have been used in part of a product design. Let me be clear here. This is something you establish prior to sale. You do don't do it after the sale. But the US is hell bent on destroying the idea of global supply chains.
Only a fool would believe that strategy has legs.
So, and it's completely logical, anyone currently using US technology will seek to find alternatives for the long haul. That is happening as I write. The EU processor initiative was designed to bring technological independence to the bloc, specifically so it would not depend on external politics.
China had a similar plan but it has been turbo charged beyond belief now.
The US semiconductor landscape will not be recognisable a few years down the road. The damage has already been done. There is no way things will be the same again.
Is any of what I'm saying actually incorrect? Of course not. Can you paint me a picture of US semiconductor prosperity from any source?
Not even US semiconductor organisations representing literally thousands of US companies have been able to find anything positive in what is going on.
The first and biggest single hit was losing over 11 billion dollars in trade to Huawei.
Well that trade (11 billion dollar's worth) will go straight to US competitors in the EU and Asia and fund Chinese companies to create yet more competitors.
Someone, somewhere forgot that US companies actually need revenues to fund R&D for future developments.
Or will government fund that too? Because one of the big US gripes was that the Chinese government was subsidising its companies.
Again, someone obviously didn't realise that governments are funding companies everywhere, but that includes the US!
Someone even banded the idea of pumping US government money into Nokia and Ericsson to make them more competitive.
Now we have semiconductor shortages and the US suddenly wants to plough billions of government money into the semiconductor industry.
Better late than never but we already know how this will end. US dominance in many fields is passing. It's just happening even more quickly now.
This isn't bias. They are hard, cold facts.
They are also very easy to understand. The problem is that the US elected the worst possible president at the worst possible time and it is now a question of watching everything play out.
Don't eat your popcorn all at once!
Tally up those Chinese made mobile phone sales in the EU and compare them to just five years ago.
Look at Apple's handset business model today and compare it to five years ago. They are radically different.
Now think about the next five years and India, Latin America and Africa. Who is sowing the seeds of growth in those markets today and who will emerge as the dominant players in those regions?
You are very long winded, with weak and/or optimistic arguments, and you have shown bias for China, and you wrong about significant details, but you have had your say.
Unfortunately for you, what I have stated about the PRC is true, that the West is growing tired of the bullying from the PRC, and the obvious mercantilism, and is especially concerned over attempts by the PRC to change the rules of order, that have worked so well for the global community. Oh, and really not happy about the PRC's human rights violations, crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, or the threats against Taiwan. The militarism that the PRC is displaying is very concerning as well, and has had the effect of bolstering our alliances around the world, including in the EU. Who would have imagined the Germany would station a frigate in the South China Sea.
Not to worry. Relations between Germany and China were already strained before tasking the frigate to the SCS.
As Merkel’s lengthy term comes to an end, the frigate deployment may be the beginning of a sea change in Germany’s China approach.
Signs are growing in number that relations between China and the European Union are experiencing serious troubles, and in some cases Chinese diplomacy with specific EU members, such as Lithuania and Sweden, has become outright icy in nature. However, the largest of the EU’s economies, Germany, has long sought a balancing policy between China and its Western friends and allies, with the government of Angela Merkel ever-cognizant of both U.S.-led pressure to develop a stronger multilateral approach to countering Chinese power, while at the same time ensuring the stability of robust German trade relations with Beijing.
However, with the Merkel administration soon to be coming to a close, there will be considerable early pressure on her successor to clarify the country’s China policies, and the question is now whether, based on both domestic politics and foreign pressures, Germany can maintain its current “hedging” policy toward Beijing in the near term. The announcement late last year that Germany would be sending a frigate to the Asia-Pacific region for the latter half of this year, in an operation that will include a transit of the politically tempestuous South China Sea, is the strongest indication yet of the conundrum Germany is facing. Berlin is trying to demonstrate solidarity with Europe and the U.S. in addressing Chinese assertiveness, while avoiding being targeted by Beijing’s retaliatory “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which has recentlyaffected other governments seen as “insulting the Chinese nation.”
The German Navy’s Brandenburg-class frigate Bayern (Bavaria), departed the base at Wilhelmshaven this week, and will be operating in the Asia-Pacific region until early next year. The vessel is scheduled to make calls in several regional ports, including in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, and is also planning to traverse the South China Sea this December. German authorities have stressed that the Bayern will be using traditional sea lanes in the South China Sea, and will avoid entering the Taiwan Straits. This will mark the first time in almost two decades that a German naval vessel has entered the South China Sea, with the country’s Defense Ministry framing the mission as one of support for Asia-Pacific regional partners as well as demonstrating German commitments to freedom of the seas.
China’s response to this news has so far been cautious, with a Chinese Foreign Ministry comment in March of this year including a reminder that while the South China Sea is subject to international law, other governments should view that status as an “excuse to undermine the sovereignty and security of littoral countries.” The nationalist Global Times Chinese news service recently reiterated this stance, stating that as long as the German vessel respected international law and avoided “willful actions” in the South China Sea, there would be no diplomatic damage caused. The Chinese government has also deferred a decision on whether the Bayern can dock in Shanghai during its regional tour until it receives further information regarding the specific “intentions” of the vessel’s mission. It was also suggested by a Chinese military news service that the ultimate decision to allow the Shanghai port visit may wait until after Germany’s September elections.
Still, as you are so fond of stating, "we will see".
Unfortunately for China, their economy isn't expected to surpass the U.S. until about 2032, if ever, and the chances of that are decreasing with Xi Jinping in power. I blame this on Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule, over anything else. China's aging population, compounded by its forced birth rate, almost guarantees that the PRC will not escape the "middle age trap", and will end up with a diminishing population, having never become rich.
Have a nice day.
Long winded?
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
After the German Bundesrat recently passed the IT-Security Law, things have been looking increasingly grim for Huawei’s expansion in Europe. A patchwork of different national approaches to the Chinese tech giant has emerged across Europe. EURACTIV takes a closer look.
Germany is the last of the big EU economies to regulate the 5G sector. Berlin has long been wary not to alienate China in its handling of 5G, as it feared that a firm stance on Huawei could hamper trade relations, and thereby the access of its precious car manufacturers to the Chinese market.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has continuously fended off the hawks in her own party, who urged the government to take a tougher stance on Huawei.
Germany’s tougher stance
While Germany has long been criticised for its bureaucratic approach in assessing which 5G provider is considered trustworthy, the final version of the IT-Security Law 2.0 added a political layer to the process: the German government now has the ability to veto the procurement from untrustworthy suppliers.
While the law is not a “lex Huawei” per se and does not single out Huawei directly, the message is clear. “Companies that are under the control of authoritarian states are considered to be untrustworthy,” the CDU parliamentarian Christoph Bernstiel told a plenary session of the Bundestag.
Bernstiel did not hesitate to point out Huawei directly: “If the Chinese Communist party continues to act as it has been doing in Hong Kong, in their treatment of the Uighurs, or with their aggressive expansion in the South-China sea, then I highly doubt that we would classify a company that is under the control of the Chinese government as a trustworthy 5G supplier.”
China doubles down on baseless 'US origins' Covid conspiracy as Delta outbreak worsens
Hong Kong (CNN)As Beijing grapples with a worsening outbreak of the Delta variant, an outlandish conspiracy theory linking the origin of the coronavirus to the United States military has gained renewed traction in China.
The wholly unfounded theory, which claims the virus may have been leaked from a US Army lab, has been repeatedly promoted by Chinese officials and state media since March last year.
But over the past week, Beijing has doubled down on the conspiracy, mobilizing its diplomats and vast propaganda apparatus to call for a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The campaign comes after Beijing rejected WHO's proposal for a second-phase probe into the origins of Covid-19 last month. The study would include audits of laboratories and markets in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic. That has drawn the ire of Beijing, with a top Chinese health official accusing WHO of "disregarding common sense and defying science."
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
You do realise that none of that (and I mean zero) has anything whatsoever to do with 5G security, don't you?
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
Yet, Huawei isn't doing so well in the EU, and with the exception of Canada, which is "on the fence", all of the five eyes have in essence banned Huawei as well.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The EU? The CDU?
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
Yeah, the world's a big place, and China wants to change the rules.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
When former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invited officials from Australia, India, and the United States to meet in Manila in November 2017, Chinese leaders saw little reason to worry. This gathering of “the Quad,” as the grouping was known, was merely “a headline-grabbing idea,” scoffed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. “They are like the sea foam in the Pacific or Indian Ocean: they get some attention but will soon dissipate.” Beijing had some reason for such dismissiveness. The interests of the Quad’s members were, Chinese strategists assessed, too divergent to allow for real coherence. Anyway, the Quad grouping had already been tried more than a decade earlier, with little in the way of real results.
Within a few years of that November 2017 gathering, however, Beijing had started to rethink its initial dismissiveness. By March of this year, when the Quad held its first leader-level summit and issued its first leader-level communique, Chinese officials had begun to view the Quad with growing concern. Since then, Beijing has concluded that the Quad represents one of the most consequential challenges to Chinese ambitions in the years ahead.
As “strategic competition” with China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus in Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken to warning that his country faces a “struggle over the future of the international order” with a United States determined to thwart China’s rise. Xi believes that Beijing has an opportunity between now and 2035 to make China the world’s top economic, technological, and potentially even military power. Integral to this push is persuading countries in Asia and around the world that Chinese dominance is inevitable and that, accordingly, they have no option but to start deferring to Chinese demands. That would enable China to begin rewriting the rules of the international order—and entrench its global leadership position—without ever having to fire a shot.
The Quad is uniquely problematic for China’s strategy because its aim of unifying a multilateral coalition of resistance has the potential to stiffen spines across the whole of the Indo-Pacific and possibly beyond. For Xi, the critical question is whether the Quad will evolve to be large, coherent, and comprehensive enough to effectively balance against China, thereby undermining any sense that its dominance, in Asia or globally, is inevitable. So far, Beijing has struggled to mount an effective response to the Quad challenge. Whether Chinese officials settle on a strategy that succeeds in undermining the Quad’s progress will be one of the key factors in determining the course of U.S.-Chinese competition—and the fate of China’s global ambitions more generally— in what has already become a “decade of living dangerously.”
...
When Abe got the band back together a decade later, strategic circumstances had changed dramatically. After years of growing U.S.-Chinese tensions, assertive Chinese behavior in the South China and East China Seas, and repeated clashes between Chinese and Indian forces along their contested land border, the strategic calculus on China had evolved in all the Quad capitals. Still, Beijing thought it had little reason to worry after the Quad reassembled, in November 2017, for a working-level meeting of diplomats on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Manila: they failed to issue a joint communique outlining a common strategic purpose, instead releasing uncoordinated individual statements that served mostly to highlight divergences on key concerns. Beijing remained largely indifferent even after the first meeting of the Quad’s foreign ministers, in September 2019 in New York, and even when the ministers finally agreed to work together on what would become the Quad’s mantra: to “advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Then, in June 2020, Chinese and Indian forces clashed along their shared border, leaving 20 Indian soldiers dead and causing New Delhi, heretofore the most reluctant member of the Quad, to reassess its strategic priorities and demonstrate new eagerness to balance Chinese power. When the Quad’s foreign ministers met again, in October 2020 in Tokyo, Beijing began to pay attention. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated bluntly that Washington’s goal was to “institutionalize” the Quad, “build out a true security framework,” and even expand the grouping at “the appropriate time” in order to “counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us.” (Pompeo had earlier gathered New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam for what became known as the “Quad Plus” talks on trade, technology, and supply chain security.)
Following the meeting, India invited Australia to join its annual Malabar naval exercises held with the United States and Japan. This was notable because India had previously refused to allow Australian participation in the exercises for fear of antagonizing Beijing. Now, thanks in large part to the June 2020 border clash, all remaining hesitation in Delhi was gone. From Beijing’s perspective, the geopolitical wei qi board was suddenly looking less advantageous.
FROM DIVIDE TO ATTACK
At first, Chinese strategists seemed to think there was a relatively straightforward solution to the new challenge from the Quad: using a combination of carrots and sticks to drive a wedge between the economic and security interests of the Quad’s members. By stressing each state’s overwhelming dependence on the Chinese market, Beijing hoped to break the Quad apart.
Following the October 2020 Quad ministerial meeting and the subsequent Malabar naval exercises, Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, changed his tone dramatically, slamming the effort to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” and calling the Quad’s Indo-Pacific strategy “a big underlying security risk” to the region. Beijing also selected a target against which to use a stick. Chinese strategic tradition advises “killing one to warn a hundred.” In this case, the idea was to kill one (Australia) to warn two (India and Japan).
Beijing had previously seemed intent on improving relations with Canberra. But without specific explanation, it suddenly imposed restrictions on imports of Australian coal—and then meat, cotton, wool, barley, wheat, timber, copper, sugar, lobster, and wine. As the smallest of the four Quad economies, Australia would, in Beijing’s judgment, be the most vulnerable to economic pressure (and by dint of size and geography, less threatening to Chinese security interests). At the same time, China worked to repair relations with India and Japan. Following years of efforts to improve ties with Tokyo, Beijing tried to finalize a visit by Xi to meet with Abe’s successor, Yoshihide Suga. And it sought to de-escalate tensions with India by negotiating an agreement to pull back troops from the area where clashes had occurred and working quietly to secure the release of a captured Chinese solider in order to avoid sparking a nationalist firestorm.
But Beijing had underestimated the effect of its own actions on Quad solidarity, and neither of these carrots had the intended effect. In Tokyo, aggravation over Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea and concerns about human rights and Hong Kong had begun to throw the relationship into a deep chill. In Delhi, wariness of China had become deeply ingrained, no matter that the immediate standoff had been resolved. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar explained, the border clashes had produced greater “comfort levels” in Delhi with the need “to engage much more intensively on matters of national security” with Washington and other partners. The arrival of a new administration in Washington, one that would bring a renewed focus on allied, regional, and multilateral engagement and move quickly to resolve Trump-era trade and military-basing disputes with Asian allies, added a further obstacle to Beijing’s plan.
By early this year, Chinese officials had realized that neither ignoring nor splitting the Quad would work. So Beijing moved on to a third option: full-scale political attack.
The March meeting of the Quad’s leaders confirmed growing Chinese concerns about the grouping’s significance. By convening the Quad’s top leaders for the first time (albeit virtually) so early in his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden signaled that the group would be central to his strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And for the first time, the meeting produced a unified communique committing to promote “a free, open, rules-based order, rooted in international law” and to defend “democratic values, and territorial integrity.” The Quad also pledged to jointly manufacture and distribute one billion COVID-19 vaccine doses throughout the region. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to what may be Beijing’s worst fears when he declared, “Today’s summit meeting shows that the Quad has come of age. It will now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.”
Since then, there has been an explosion in Chinese condemnations of the Quad as a “small clique” of countries trying to “start a new Cold War.” In May, Xi denounced efforts to use “multilateralism as a pretext to form small cliques or stir up ideological confrontation.” China has begun to portray itself as the champion of “genuine multilateralism” and as the leading defender of the United Nations system. Xi and other Chinese officials have started talking more frequently about “great-power responsibility” and China’s status as the “responsible great power.” Beijing is also doubling down on its efforts to develop alternate trade frameworks by promoting its membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), attempting to finalize the EU-Chinese investment agreement, and flirting with the idea of joining the CPTPP (the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which evolved out of the U.S.-driven Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations). Beijing’s hope is that it can isolate and marginalize the Quad by diplomatically and commercially outflanking it on the global stage.
Yet such denunciations have so far done little to stall the Quad’s progress. Biden’s June trip to Europe—where Australia and India joined a gathering of the G-7 and U.S. discussions with the EU and NATO included a heavy China component—reinforced fears that the Quad could integrate itself into a broader anti-Chinese alliance. And U.S.-South Korean interactions, including President Moon Jae-in’s May visit to Washington, reinforced fears that the Quad could bring in South Korea and become “the Quint”; although Seoul has usually been reluctant to side explicitly with the United States against China, the two countries’ joint statement agreed that they “acknowledge the importance of open, transparent, and inclusive regional multilateralism including the Quad.”
China has considerable reason to worry about such developments and what they could mean for its regional and global prospects. On the security front, for example, the Quad changes Beijing’s thinking about various scenarios in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea and, to a lesser degree, in the East China Sea, as China’s sense of the likelihood of Australian, Indian, or Japanese military involvement in any conflict involving the United States grows. Especially significant would be the Quad’s coordination with the United States’ Pacific Deterrence Initiative. A distributed network of land-based antiship missiles and other precision-strike capabilities stationed in allied countries in the region could hinder Beijing’s threat to Taiwan with an amphibious invasion, a blockade, or land-based missiles—although political agreement on such deployments in individual Quad countries is far from guaranteed. Another Chinese concern is that the Quad will move toward an intelligence-sharing arrangement with the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, which would allow for sensitive information on Chinese strategy and behavior to be more widely disseminated.
But the worst-case scenario from Beijing’s perspective is that the Quad could serve as the foundation of a broader global anti-Chinese coalition. If the Quad were to draw other Asian countries, the EU, and NATO into efforts to confront or undermine China’s international ambitions, it could over time swing the collective balance of power definitively against China. The Quad could also lay the groundwork for a broader allied economic, customs, and standards union, which could reshape everything from global infrastructure funding to supply chains to technology standards. The Biden White House’s senior Asia official, Kurt Campbell, has already spoken of the need to provide a “positive economic vision” for the Indo-Pacific; Beijing fears that the Quad could become the fulcrum for such an effort.
One bright spot from Beijing’s perspective is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which is likely to keep its distance from the Quad, as part of its general neutrality on U.S.-Chinese tensions. Chinese officials also take comfort from continued protectionist sentiment in both Washington and Delhi, which means that neither is likely to join the CPTPP (or even RCEP) any time soon. Indeed, the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy will remain the greatest tool for weakening the Quad and subverting anti-Chinese efforts more broadly: for Beijing, China’s continued economic growth and increasing share of the global economy remain its most important strategic advantages, as they were in the past.
China will also double down on strategic and military cooperation with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have already committed to expand bilateral nuclear energy cooperation, and in a May call with Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Chinese-Russian relations “the best in history.” From China’s perspective, Russia serves as a useful military partner and, with respect to the Quad, offers a way to expand China’s field of strategic options geographically. Russia’s proximity to Japan and its continued occupation of Japan’s Northern Territories, for example, could make Tokyo think twice before joining with the United States in any future military scenarios involving China.
The continued consolidation of the Quad will also drive further increases in Chinese military spending. Even if some Chinese analysts are doubtful about the actual impact of the Quad on the hard business of warfighting, military officials will argue that they must be ready for worst-case scenarios involving the Quad. Chinese officials are wary of repeating the Soviet Union’s mistake of military overextension at the expense of the civilian economy. But if they see the correlation of forces with the United States and its allies shifting against China, Beijing’s military spending will increase accordingly, turbocharging the regional arms race in Asia.
Ultimately, the biggest question may be what all of this means for Xi, especially in the run-up to the 20th Party Congress, in the fall of 2022, where Xi hopes to secure his own long-term political dominance. There is some chance that the Quad’s progress will offer Xi’s detractors additional evidence of his inclination to strategic overreach. More likely, however, is that Xi will ultimately manage to strengthen his own hand by pointing to the Quad as proof that China’s adversaries are circling the Motherland, thereby further consolidating his hold on power.
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
All of that is irrevelant here!
Huawei has nothing to do with any of that and yes, it is a victim. It was being used as a pawn in Trump's trade war.
How do we know this?
Let's put a simplistic explanation on the table and forget for a moment that not a shred of evidence against Huawei has ever been brought to the table:
But at least I'm not emotionally invested in a Chinese company like AvonB7 is, and it's not like the PRC doesn't do the same shit to other countries for political reasons.
It also appears that you can't let it go either, constantly having some lame response about me, not about what what I've posted. But no matter, it's pretty apparent that I have a better idea of what's going on wrt China foreign policy and militarization than either of you two yahoo's do. Go have a good cry together.
So you blame Avon for the explosion of your obsessive hatred? Typical. But sad.
Sorry TMay, because you have been taught to hate something or somebody and you look for ways to justify your hate does not make THEM evil.
When AvonB7 states that he has no bias, and yet has demonstrates a huge emotional attachment to Huawei since he has been posting at AI, what else am I to think? He doesn't even attempt to hide that. Yet you and he are quick to state how biased everyone else is.
More to the point, you lecturing me about "hate" is. at the least, incredibly ironic, since my "hate" is against an oppressive authoritarian government, a government that you openly side with when they are accused of human rights violations. A country that you openly support in crushing democracies in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Yet you use "hate" against anyone you disagree with like people use condiments, without thought or consequence.
What's up with that? Am I to believe that you are an avowed Communist living in a our U.S. democracy? Are you so concerned about the so called "hegemony" of the U.S. and the West that you would sell your soul to Communism?
That's how you come across. Maybe that is how you are.
I will note that U.S. Navy's "hegemony" has provided the backbone of freedom of navigation since WWII, and that is why there is reliable global trade. Do you really think that the China's PLAN would do the same?
I'm pleased the at the EU is acting to support Human Rights;
BEIJING (AP) — China on Friday rejected European Parliament demands that it lift sanctions against European Union legislators in order to save a trade deal between the two sides.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the sanctions were justified and demanded that the European side “immediately stop interfering in China’s internal affairs (and) abandon its confrontational approach.”
“The unreasonable sanctions imposed by the EU have led to difficulties in China-EU relations. That is what China does not want to see, and the responsibility does not lie with the Chinese side,” Zhao said at a daily briefing.
The European Parliament warned China on Thursday it won’t ratify a long-awaited business investment deal as long as sanction
Comments
That was a brief summary! LOL.
Remember those claims of 'back doors' and China 'taking control' of, or 'shutting down' 5G networks across the world in case of conflict?
It was insane and laughable (not to mention embarrassing) when those claims were made public but they were always completely crackpot material. Never more than that.
5G is a collection of industry standards! Even security is a standard. And Huawei is the ONLY company that has security and transparency centres.
Carriers run the networks! Not the ICT providers.
Huawei made this clear from minute one but the US insisted with the crazy claims. Often from people who had no idea what they were even talking about and couldn't even pronounce the name Huawei. All they knew was that they were a competitive threat and were ahead of US companies.
They foolishly went on record with their absurd claims and fears (yes, fears) and the president tweeted almost every crazy thought that popped into his head in real time. That alone is a treasure trove of backward thinking.
When Huawei offered to licence its entire 5G technology base to a US company or consortium so that it could actually compete, the claims were seen for what they really were: nonsense. Utter nonsense.
They would have got to see into literally everything, right down to the last character of code. They didn't want that because they already knew there was nothing there to support their claims and licencing 5G from a Chinese company was never in their game plan anyway. They wanted to destroy Huawei. Plain and simple. They even went on record as saying exactly that! Then they said they wanted to choke them. You don't try to out compete rivals when they have the upper hand. Nope, the US outright wanted to destroy the company and even went on record with that desire.
But 5G wasn't the real issue here. 5G is a springboard for an industrial revolution. It was that revolution that worried the US so much because its own roll out plans were so far behind China's. Woefully behind. China is already implementing business solutions that are giving its companies a competitive edge. They are already ahead and exporting that knowhow around the globe.
You didn't actually provide a single valid counter-claim to what I said. You couldn't because it is all verifiable. It isn't bias.
What you did is what you always do. Simply ignore the pertinent facts and go on a broad anti China rant that is entirely based on bias.
That's not my problem though.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/eu-countries-keep-different-approaches-to-huawei-on-5g-rollout/
Gee, that could be me talking...
China's propaganda in action...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/06/china/china-covid-origin-mic-intl-hnk/index.html
Yeah, what a wonderful government China has...
These are basically political layers, not technical. The EU toolbox are also simply non-binding guidelines. You may call it technical guidance if you want but it is not part of 5G standards.
But that is your bias again.
The GSMA/3GPP is more relevant to 5G security.
Surprise, surprise...
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20201229000794
You want to paint a picture. The facts of the matter are irrelevant to you. The details are irrevelant to you.
In February of this year Huawei announced it had signed over 90 commercial 5G contracts. At that time more than any other 5G provider.
You completely ignored the reasoning that CDU Parliamentarian Christoph Bersteil provided, but of course, you don't consider "trustworthiness" of China as an issue.
Looks like I and others do consider "trustworthiness" of the source a necessity for critical infrastructure, which Telecom surely is.
Maybe purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is in fact, perilous.
The world is a big place.
Remember: 90 countries (EU member states among them). One political party within a country is just that, one political party. Policies can change at the drop of a hat - literally. Just ask Boris Johnson. Sometimes the hat hasn't hit the ground before policy is reversed!
Your bias again. Ignoring the facts I presented completely and cherry picking your points. Sometimes the opinion of just one individual.
Purchasing critical technology from an authoritarian country is perilous? Why?
It is standards based. It is examined and audited down to the source code. It has passed security certification and here's the kicker: Huawei has been providing critical technology to the world (170 countries now) for 30 years without a single major security breach. The US command in Afghanistan ran its communications over Huawei infrastructure, too.
Let's compare that with what we know about US communications interference over the last 30 years. We know what the CIA, NSA and other agencies have been up to. You know, Operation Shotgiant, PRISM, Crypto AG, spying on allies, having to apologise for spying on allies and then getting caught at it again. Let's tie that up with bullying sovereign states, establishing de facto extra territorial 'sanctions' with the backing of literally nobody, and trying to 'buy' decisions in other sovereign states etc.
It starts to sound 'perilous' too, doesn't it? Maybe moreso, and this is supremely ironic, because it shows that the US cannot be trusted. Yet we can't really speak of trusted US 5G suppliers because basically there are none and that is why this issue blew up in the first place: the US lost out big time on possibly the greatest technological seismic shift in recent memory.
You have a parochial view of National Security; you always have. So for you, nothing about National Security makes sense.
Fortunately for the West, there are countries that stand in the way of China's military expansionism;
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-06/why-quad-alarms-china
China's increasingly Militaristic behavior is the reason that so many Western countries are allied against them today, and Huawei, is certainly not an innocent victim of the West's response to that.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
Time to let go.
You've gone off the rails again.
And there is your bias in ALL its glory.
Time to let go.
You've gone off the rails again.
LOL!
Huawei's mistake was allowing the company to become China's National Champion, and also, being involved in China's mercantilist policies, all while involved in some shady deals with known terrorist countries, in a world already concerned about the national security aspects of telecom infrastructure. There's also that surveillance technology that they were connected with in the Xinjiang region, that doesn't help them.
It was obvious to the Trump administration that Huawei would make a useful pressure point, and they certainly did so. They might as well have driven a stake through Huawei's heart.
Whatever happened to Huawei is of no concern to me today, but China's militarization does concern me, and importantly, a lot of other countries are also concerned. That's why Huawei is failing in the West; too many national security concerns.
Now Xiamoi and Oppo are feeding off of Huawei's corpse in the smartphone market.
Sad.
But at least I'm not emotionally invested in a Chinese company like AvonB7 is, and it's not like the PRC doesn't do the same shit to other countries for political reasons.
It also appears that you can't let it go either, constantly having some lame response about me, not about what what I've posted. But no matter, it's pretty apparent that I have a better idea of what's going on wrt China foreign policy and militarization than either of you two yahoo's do. Go have a good cry together.
More to the point, you lecturing me about "hate" is. at the least, incredibly ironic, since my "hate" is against an oppressive authoritarian government, a government that you openly side with when they are accused of human rights violations. A country that you openly support in crushing democracies in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Yet you use "hate" against anyone you disagree with like people use condiments, without thought or consequence.
What's up with that? Am I to believe that you are an avowed Communist living in a our U.S. democracy? Are you so concerned about the so called "hegemony" of the U.S. and the West that you would sell your soul to Communism?
That's how you come across. Maybe that is how you are.
I will note that U.S. Navy's "hegemony" has provided the backbone of freedom of navigation since WWII, and that is why there is reliable global trade. Do you really think that the China's PLAN would do the same?
I'm pleased the at the EU is acting to support Human Rights;
https://apnews.com/article/china-europe-trade-agreements-global-trade-business-cf73bb19ff7a13ddfa87a45d8441aef1