Huawei released a new phone that, again, manages to stir Western fears about China.

The Chinese benchmarking website An Tu Tu has identified a new cpu now used by Huawei in their recently released Mate 60 Pro smartphone, the HiSilicon-designed Kirin 9000S system-on-chip, which support 5G.

But... but... the Biden sanctions?!

The Washington Post, surprisingly, was one of the few majors to discuss this, stating on 2-Sep:

“It was no normal gadget. And its launch has sparked hushed concern in Washington that U.S. sanctions have failed to prevent China from making a key technological advance. Such a development would seem to fulfill warnings from U.S. chipmakers that sanctions wouldn’t stop China, but would spur it to redouble efforts to build alternatives to U.S. technology.”

For some reason, the Yahoo!News reprinted version of the WaPo article is the only one I found.

The next day, Fortune posted a piece titled “America and China’s $574 billion chip war has already scored an ‘extraordinary success beyond anyone’s wild dreams’ for Joe Biden”. 

The article touts the success of the export controls applied by the Biden administration, these meant to “restrict China’s procurement of highly advanced chips and the computers containing them”, as well as “the tools that could be used to make them, such as Netherlands-based ASML’s state-of-the-art lithography machine.” Along with the Dutch, Japan also backed this move.

Kevin Klyman, a technology policy researcher at Harvard University, told Fortune, “It has been an extraordinary success beyond anyone's wildest dreams that the Netherlands and Japan have joined U.S. export controls to the hilt. That was not what outside analysts expected.”

So, how can China make such a thing?! That's gotta deserve more sanctions, right?

And as usual, the US shows us how much it truly values the honest competition that it sells to the world, good sportmenship being what drives the Capitalism it holds as its religion.

Let’s recall that the US used to be a leading manufacturer of microchips, yet, over the last twenty years, 780 chip manufacturing plants were closed in the US, and 150,000 jobs were sent abroad. Let’s also remind ourselves how the microchip industry achieved this, doing so after having received over $9.5 billion in government subsidies. (Source)

So, after taxpayers paid to ship these jobs overseas so companies could make bigger profits and save on taxes, the policies that permitted this being ones that were supported by all of DC, including Biden and the Dems. And now, one of the Biden successes that’s repeatedly flaunted is his huge investment in these same companies so they’ll bring manufacturing back, and how, because of Biden, the US has won the tech war against China?

No wonder this new chip is stirring ripples but not making any real news in the West.

And all of this comes after Taiwanese TSMC folks voiced deep frustrations regarding developments inside their behind-schedule-and-over-budget Arizona plant on 28-Aug-2023, repeating the same complaints they’d voiced in April, but adding that “[the US] would not listen to us”.

The plant’s owner states that the conditions imposed by Biden are “unacceptable”, and that nothing delivered so far meets the extremely high standards required for the successful manufacturing of chips, including a severe shortage of qualified individuals.

Will US taxpayers have to pay to import workers to work in the plants the US brought back, creating employment…

Imperialism. It all seems so bonkers these days.

Perhaps it's outdated?

As an aside: 5G has always made me uneasy, though not for the reasons that are usually given by those who picket against 5G, or who implicate 5G as a weapon or cause in all sorts of convoluted stories, but, simply, because of the sheer volume of info that’s transportable through 5G. If you’re currently on a 5G network, chances are, your phone is exploiting just a tiny fraction of the info bandwidth 5G makes possible. With 5G, your phone can capture, transmit, and receive info about your heartbeat and blood sugar as you’re chatting and watching a video, and as the camera on the street corner captures you raising your hand and making a “taxi” signal, your biometrics are sent to some DB that confirms phone ownership as account info and geolocation is seized and communicated to Uber while banking info is sent and confirmed to verify available funds. This is massive amounts of info being transferred simultaneously—and that’s for one user—and my example isn’t really doing justice to what this represents, I feel.

In other words, the type of governmental control applied through some omnipresent computer system such as what’s been central to many dystopian tales, 5G makes that possible.

The Chinese already have 6G ready to go.

Yes, China has integrated many of those aspects in its society, but much of it in restricted areas, some purely as tests. And they’re fully transparent about those implementations. Conversely, I don’t expect the same from Western governments, and it’s that technology in their hands that frightens me more.