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From /u/gwern (@gwern ?): analysis on China’s semiconductor industry.
Recent export controls are directly targeting the Chinese ability to fabricate cutting-edge chips. The subsequent effect on electronics prices and the much-maligned supply chain won’t be pleasant—especially for China, and especially if their industry is already slumping. Consequences for the rest of the world are left as an exercise to the reader.
Given the forum, it’s not surprising that the focus is on AI. I’m more interested in the geopolitical outlook. This is an incentive to retaliate, perhaps even against the other regional semiconductor fabricator. And it is suggested that the timing is a calculated insult to Chinese leadership, as they are apparently going through a periodic dog-and-pony show of elections. Gwern suggests that China would otherwise be raising hell.
The counterpart in US domestic politics: crunching semiconductor supply will not mix well with inflation. I don’t think adding $50 to the next iPhone will make or break Democrats, but it seems unlikely to help.
I want to place predictions, but I don’t have a good grasp of the metrics involved. Place your bets, I guess, for:
China taking economic action
China taking military action
Consequences on Chinese industry
Tech policy towards China becoming a wedge issue in American politics
The Chinese do not want decoupling. All their actions have shown this abundantly clearly. As such, I suspect their reaction will be muted.
As for Taiwan, it has become a prestige issue but everyone knows whether or not China controls the island makes little concrete difference. The US isn't going to invade the Chinese mainland and there are questions whether the US can even defend the island given the massive missile arsenal of the Chinese that would make life utter hell for any navy fleet trying to intervene. And of course, all this ignores the massive navy that China has built up.
I suspect China will muddle along and build up domestic competitors. Much of the chip industry is entering a bear market with oversupply and weak demand. With China out of the game, it will be Deep Freeze for most of these firms. Almost every day you hear horror stories of CapEx being slashed 60-80%. I don't think the pol sci/lawyer class that runs the bureaucracy has understood this fully, if at all.
Chip industry doesn’t rely on China. At all. Chinas chip industry is all low tier chips used for things like alarm clocks. Hardly a doomsday scenario for the economy
Speaking as someone in the chip industry, we most certainly do rely on China.
The Chinese market is massive, and was, until recently, growing at an eye-watering pace. I know of a few companies that took 20%+ off the balance sheets permanently when the Huawei sanctions hit a few years back. Even if the latest sanctions target advanced capabilities and leading-edge chips, these are still the centerpieces of designs with millions of units of volume (particularly in telecom, for 5G deployment and Chinese Android phones sold across the world), and less-advanced companies had many roles in these systems which are now jeopardized. Chinese electronics and electronics-adjacent industries, even those not relying on advanced chips or tools, are no doubt eyeing the latest round of sanctions with concern that their niche will be next. Semiconductor sales volume to China is going to slow down a lot for the next year or two, which is going to do damage to companies whose growth strategy was dependent on the continued growth of that market.
I'm less knowledgeable about the specifics on this part, but I also recall as little as a few years ago that the semiconductor packaging expertise cultivated in China is unrivaled, particularly its ability to scale. The more advanced devices nowadays bond the die to a PCB-like substrate material with extremely fine pitch routing on many layers of high-density film, to
famousfanout the contact points on the die to reasonable pitch and to improve signal/power integrity. While in theory the manufacture of the substrate and the bonding of the die can be done anywhere, China offered an unrivaled combination of rapid turnaround, high volume, and excellent quality (provided you knew where to look). There's a lot more packaging techniques developed and scaled in China, I just picked this as an example I remember; with chiplet designs for processors and chip-stacking technologies for flash memory, packaging is getting more demanding by the day. There's no explicit sanctions on this packaging equipment as far as I can tell - packaging is something the fab can contract out to a third party, and I suspect the sanctions are targeted narrowly on fab companies. Will large US semiconductor companies still need to process their finished dice in China, presenting additional risks for export control? Will the US summon up another round of sanctions to decapitate the packaging industry as well? Perhaps the industry has quietly de-risked itself over the last few years, but I can't find evidence of this with trivial googling.Anyway... we do rely on China, quite a lot, for both market size and post-fab manufacturing. Sanctions aren't doomsday, but definitely more than a haircut.
And that's before considering the possibility of TSMC catching some "errant" missiles in a hypothetical conflict (much less hypothetical than two weeks ago, to boot), knocking over more than half of worldwide advanced semiconductor production.
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My response on reddit:
All those alarmist articles about China growing to eclipse the US by 2032 or whatever, and then making a move on Taiwan... (On Iran making da bomb...) If it's clear to analytics what «will» happen in 2025-2032, then why wait and allow it to happen? Why not counter it the instant the advantage is sufficient, if that's what is plainly implied? Did everyone buy into the assumption that American decision makers are uninformed bureaucrats just going through the motions reactively, because that's implied by how some of our pet priorities with high expected utility get treated? Just the psyop known as Hanlon's razor?
Earlier discussion.
My belief is that I cannot predict the details of the next stage and will inevitably get embarrassed, but that my Political Von Neumanns thesis will be vindicated, as it is already vindicated by this extremely effective economic war – a classic problem with predicting entities smarter than oneself. The US of A is one of a handful of countries with intelligent elites, and it's an economic, military, cultural hegemon, therefore possessing great freedom of action. Its laws, sanctions, fashions and even risible delusions of its campus activists hold exterritorial power. It will win one way or another; does it matter which disaster move exactly they'll get to exploit? China, meanwhile, has only disaster moves left.
Open military moves? What can that achieve? (Though I'd have advised an attempt at annexing Taiwan, and escalation to a total nuclear war. It won't do them any good in the moment but may secure some possibility for surviving people of Han background to have agency in the future. Naturally, no sane decision maker and no CCP apparatchik reasons like that). There's no chance of a fait accompli annexation, especially after the Ukrainian case. They'll have all targets of value destroyed, probably fail the annexation anyway, get embargoed and starve; strategically significant Taiwanese will either refuse to cooperate or flee with American and Japanese aid. Even in the absolute best case, by the point PRC gets anywhere with plugging seized assets into their supply chains and replacing the unobtainable imports, Americans will be launching domestic 3nm fabs and finishing their military AGI development.
Keep biding their time, now with deflating economy? To what end? In a few years, Taiwan will leapfrog the Mainland in military technology both domestic and imported, and eventually declare independence and enter defensive pacts, precluding the success of conventional attacks. I have to remind people here that the idea was to build competitive economy in Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, edging out Taiwanese businesses, brain-draining the island, lowering the «Taiwanese identity»'s relative prestige and eventually just swallowing it by fiat, sort of like it was done with Hong Kong (and even then it relied much more on brute force). Can't really do that when the gap with Taiwan is growing, not shrinking; the gap in scientific productivity e.g. Nature Index, GDP per capita, comprehensive economic health, life satisfaction, everything.
Economic action? Like what? They need the world more than the world needs them; much of our common prosperity over the last few decades is powered by Chinese labor, and we shall weep for its passing, but prosperity is not strategically vital. Even those fancy new TSMC chips are not vital – Arizona, Israel, South Korea can produce adequate ones. Everything that the Chinese do is commodified and reliant on higher-margin, more sophisticated Western tools which could just as well be utilized to rebuild industry elsewhere. Realistically they only have monopoly on rare earth metals, and it's wholly a matter of political will on the West, preparedness to weather a few hard years. I am positive that when presented with the frame of an «existential conflict with fascists», people of the «free world» will not just forgo buying another iPhone but proudly starve and freeze to death, if politely asked to. The assumption of materialism and small-mindedness of the opposing side is a characteristic failure mode of authoritarian regimes, and in this particular case a projection (same story with jaded Russian «ilita»).
In the end it's very trivial. Rule one: be attractive. Rule two: Don't be unattractive. If you cannot attract talent and cannot keep domestic talent in, you will fail – you'll just bleed to half-death and begin making erratic self-defeating moves that only talentless people consider reasonable. Of course, if you lack talent yourself, you'll fail to realize the depth of those rules to begin with. Xi is not very talented, and it seems like he doesn't listen to talented people.
So it goes.
I've been meaning to address this thesis for a while, but always missed the time window of when your posts on it were fresh, so here goes nothing anyway. I think there is a difference between the natural sciences and the political/interpersonal domain in that we have figured out (or at least made very nontrivial advances on) the question of how to preserve, filter for quality and transmit knowledge in the former, but I don't see the evidence that the same happened for the latter. Von Neumann may have been a genius, but he still went to school and learned from teachers who learned from textbooks built upon generations more of textbooks and teachers, and whatever innate abilities he had served him well in a world that was already a well-kept garden of formalisms and abstractions and symbol-pushing problems that he could crunch in his oversized cranium. If von Neumann had been born as a contemporary of Isidore of Seville, or Caesar, or Hammurabi, or Grug the 3rd, would he have achieved anything that would have actually impressed a middling modern PhD student in maths or a natural science? Far from helping design the atomic bomb, could he have even figured out the physics to accurately trebuchet a boulder into a castle on the first try, given no calculus? I think not, so how many grunts would an ancient von Neumann have been worth to Caesar's army?
On the other hand, I really see no political equivalent of calculus, or the notion of formal proof, or atomic theory, and no circumstantial evidence that such a thing exists somewhere where I can't see it. Cicero's speeches read no worse than Joe Biden's, and their schemes, modulo amplification of their physical power by the ilk of physicists, seem no wilier than those I hear of of the Medicis or the Ottoman court. Given that, why should we assume that a political von Neumann today should be more formidable than a scientific von Neumann in Cyrus the Great's army would have been to the Greeks?
This is in my opinion a very consumer-like idea of intelligence. «Intelligence is useless unless you already have an infrastructure to plug it into». Or maybe nerdish «Returns to intelligence only scale in very legible technical domains». No, intelligence includes the ability to figure out and devise «sockets» for itself in any domain; and Fat Tony is not dumber than an IYI, for street smarts are a straightforward application of g. Without his scientific education, von Neumann would have plausibly become one of the most powerful bankers in history, greatly pleasing his father. But this should make us wonder why he was born into a banker's family in the first place; and how smart people of old banker dynasties (like Warburg are), seeing as there hasn't been a solid theory of financial capital until recently. In fact, their prominence has only declined with the increase of legibility and theory.
With any luck, he'd have been worth a few generals, irrespective of his ability to improve on contemporary siege weaponry, and perhaps he'd have replaced Caesar himself in textbooks – which is, in fact, my point; Ceasar was a genius himself, from what we can tell. Intelligence has become a potent multiplier of power long before the industrial age or the dawn of science. Napoleon wasn't smarter than him, but he was smart enough even outside his domain, and he's still our symbol of military genius.
Maybe what you see is the result of the latter being flooded with adversarial stimuli. We discuss absolutely inane ideas for reasons that there is a social norm against rejecting them outright and that they are accepted by a significant percentage of the public. Add a little extra noise – and the discourse degenerates into incoherence, and then no progress in scholarship is possible.
But this allows incumbent actors to keep their advantage with no specialized scholarship, with little more than general intelligence, processing speed, access to new data, memory of historical precedents, and networks made of sane allies with healthy epistemology.
Your modus tollens is my modus ponens. The more mediocre «Joe Biden» gets despite the increasing hegemony of the US achieved by well-timed and savvy moves (like this devastation of Chinese IC industry), the more reason I have to suspect that inputs into his political behavior are produced by a sophisticated intelligence not unlike that of STEM geniuses, who are of course privy to the idea of information asymmetry and are happy to keep the spotlight on Biden.
I am afraid you way overestimate how much of ancient history survived.
We know little else than names of many scientists and thinkers considered greatest geniuses in their time.
What would history said about ancient Von Neumann? Something like this:
...
NEUMANUS of Puteoli (fl. first half of 1st BCE), ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician.
N's works are completely lost, but he was mentioned by several second century sources as mathematician and geometer. One third century source claims N. was also writing about ethics and political philosophy.
About N. life is known nothing except he was of eastern Greek origin and moved to Italy later in his life.
There are no contemporary mentions of N. and his works and only few later notices.
1/Second century collection of anecdotes from lives of famous philosophers, contains two tidbits from N's life.
One extremely implausibly describes his mathematical prowess, while another is obviously meant as over-the-top parody of warmongering demagogue (it would be clear to all contemporaries that no Greek could be ever allowed to step in Roman Senate, least of all to implore the Senate to declare war against Parthian Empire in cartoonishly bloodthirsty speech).
2/Fourth century military writer in chapter about siege warfare includes apocryphal story how N. was one of Caesar's influential advisors and attributes to him invention of several war machines (current scholarly consensus is the story is later interpolation).
3/Fourth or fifth century pagan anti-Christian polemic quoted by fifth century Christian writer lists N. among famous learned and wise men who were pious worshippers of pagan gods (reading of name is disputed).
4/Seventh century Jewish chronicle lists N. among Jewish apostates and renegades who betrayed their faith (reading of name is disputed).
edit: typos, my fingers keep forgetting this site needs higher quality input than Reddit ;-)
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The former exaggerates my position way beyond what I'm willing to subscribe to. The latter... maybe, though I don't like the injection of "technical" there in particular. I think there are domains that are legible but not technical in which we also see returns to talent scale more thanks to the legibility, one good example being music. YouTube is awash with amateur musicians who, given an afternoon with FLStudio, can produce something that would leave the greatest musical geniuses of the ancient world (and even of the 1400s) in the dust as far as emotional impact, memorability etc. is concerned, at least based on what ancient music has been recovered. Surely this is in part due to the existence of musical notation, widespread understanding of chord progressions and the circumstance that you can turn on the radio and hear points whose convex hull covers a fairly big subvolume of the possible good auditory experiences we can have. I can't muster enough relativism or speculative theory of mind to not see the Epic of Gilgamesh as unambiguous drivel next to, I don't know, Twilight, either. In short - if legible patrimony doesn't matter for leveraging talent, where are the ancient literary or musical von Neumanns? Unlike in the political case, it's hard to posit adversarial action concealing their existence from us, unless you think that the political cabal anticipated this line of argument and wrote an entire history concealing its existence, Tartaria-style.
This is awfully speculative, given what we know about von Neumann's rhetorical skill and charisma. Either way, I think the argument you are implicitly making there is somewhat beside the point - an ancient would-be von Neumann turned Caesar would not prove that mathematical skill is formidable even in the absence of formal mathematics, but would just prove that political talent, whether accidental or ascribed to the hypothetical individual by correlation with his posited mathematical talent, can make you as formidable as Caesar even in the absence of legible political theory. But this, we already know, because we had Caesar. Are the "political von Neumanns" whose existence you are positing merely on the level of a Caesar or Napoleon? Because then sure, they probably still exist, but I doubt that they have the all-conquering abilities you ascribe to them, any more than the historical ones did; and it is not even clear if the expected existence of more Caesars makes Caesarhood more rather than less potent in the shrunken pond of a well-connected world.
I think the argument still remains to be made that US success is at all surprising and in need of such an explanation. I've been hearing geopolitical arguments that a singular entity that controls the North American coast and heartlands will almost necessarily become an unmatched industrial juggernaut due to the combination of productivity, logistical access and defensibility; that something with such a starting advantage would go on to crush the fractured, isolated, parasite-ridden competition, as long as it succeeds at preventing itself from footbulleting for long enough, seems plausible even without positing political superpowers operating in the shadows.
...Were you under the impression that I assert that a «political von Neumann» is a guy who can do mathematics well and excels in politics on the basis of that sort of ability?
I straight up do not believe in the existence of any specialized «mathematical talent» or «political talent» or any other talent for that matter. Barring the minor effect of subfactors, it's all just general intelligence, general ability to get things done, plus part-innate, part-taught fascination with math or with power over human affairs, respectively. The former fascination guides one into legible transparent domains like math olympiads and then STEM careers, where one's intelligence becomes easy to rank and be written about in textbooks if deemed remarkable. The latter leads elsewhere. Ed Witten could have continued on the track of politics and journalism; he didn't become any smarter after dropping it. I am not sure if he specifically would have made it big, but what I am sure about is that he wouldn't have become as much of a symbol of high intelligence.
Some people say that power over humans is just fundamentally not as interesting to intelligent people as playing with abstractions and earning six figures while being a vulnerable serf, which entirely filters out geniuses. I call them nerds and press (x) for doubt.
Even if so, do you see a lot of those in the official politics? Does, like, Blinken or DeSantis (admittedly, sharp folks) strike you as an equal of Napoleon Bonaparte, with his near-eidetic memory and incredible breadth of competence?
Even if that is some fundamental ceiling, how many of them and their networks would there need to be to make discussions about «memetics», «parties» and «populism» laughably deluded and ignorant of the true power dynamics at play?
Moreover, why would they be «merely» on the level of those two? We have a much bigger population today, better-networked, with smarter smart fractions. And much easier, institutionalized means to hide behind the noise.
I think we could make some other arguments about inevitabilities (about Heartland or about Old Europe or about the inevitable rise of East Asia or even about the promise of Africa), and also look at collapses of earlier civilizations. Those are mere narratives. The fact remains that American competition falls exactly to shooting themselves in the foot. Zero Covid is not a consequence of the country having issues with indefensible borders. Invasion of Ukraine probably is, but only because we accept the idiocy of Russian governance as a given. The European Union didn't ruin its energy policy because of being fractured more than the US of A is. It's clearly the difference in intelligence; the difference in being able to not make damning mistakes while your opponents mysteriously commit to them.
Power over humans might be poorly scalable / unreliable / limited by luck. Soft sciences are rather incapable compared to STEM stuff. Maybe 160 IQ focused into math does miracles, while 160 IQ focused into soft stuff lets you predict people to some impressive - but not that terrifying - degree? Human brains are complex systems. And then there are interactions between them. Also, since industrial revolution (or maybe earlier, to some extent), such a genius needs to also take into account crazy changes in tech too.
And then there's other similarly (or significantly) intelligent people to deal with.
Random crap happens and shapes world events to some extent. Does anyone remember ACTA? I was in middle school at the time. I can't remember clearly how, but I stumbled upon some random IRC channel and also Facebook group "protesting" it (just few thousands of users complaining pointlessly, on platform). There were few people on the IRC channel, and they DoSed some random government website. No idea what they were expecting. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but I posted link to the IRC channel, and a link to some JS DoS utility, along with some instructions. I posted that several times, expecting it to just get lost in the flood of messages. Shortly after that I went AFK for 0.5-1h. When I went back there were several hundred people on that IRC channel and apparently they managed to bring some sites down.
So TV news covered it, the same or the next day. In the following days, it was few thousand people on that channel. And also someone defaced one gov site. Some news coverage, 2. No idea if that log is from the same channel.
After it was in the news, physical protests started, and soon spread all over EU. Various elected politicians beclowned themselves rather hard. It was the CurrentThing for some time.
USA also crippled their nuclear tech. EU got caught with pants down because they expected Putin to be "rational". Which was maybe wrong, but not necessarily stupid or unreasonable.
Cutting chip exports to China - is it really high int move, and not simply some base competence?
Or maybe social scientists are just way dumber? Physical Sciences Masters are vastly superior to Social Masters in math AND superior in verbal (study). No wonder: adding to my thesis, it's so painfully clear that our progress in social sciences is kneecapped by the political power of people motivated to use them to obscure rather than discover truth, which repels anyone with half a brain from those fields. Every bit of social science that holds the promise of conclusive, replicable and useful results is politically fraught (of course one could say that safer fruit has all been picked, but was there a lot of it?). We could have had a predictive HBD-based science of economic productivity, criminality, cooperation and social cohesion half a century ago, to say nothing of this polygenic score era, but instead we're still wading through the morass of implicit bias tier fraud and «is freedom of speech worth the consequences»/«shut up scum you have freedom you just have nothing to say» pablum, with grants going into scientific stamp collecting. What do you think comes first, stupidity of the scientists or malice of their effective managers? Does it matter after incentives are, time and again, so clearly spelled out to early career scientists?
On a separate note, @4bpp doesn't seem to give enough credit to Napoleon. It's a somewhat popular idea, that maybe the field is so packed and competitive, our mediocrities would have been brilliant by the standards of yesteryear. Maybe it's powered by the progress in performance of professional athletes, or perhaps by tool-aided improvement in stuff like music. Admittedly I may underestimate Blinken, whose distinguishing features seem to be reliability, stalwart Zionism running in the family, and a history of activism – rather than anything IQ-related (then again, how would I be able to tell if he's hiding his power level?). But, well… this is normal. Napoleon was abnormal.
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I translated fun fragment of the irc log (link to a pastebin containing it is in "Some news coverage").
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I didn't think so, but your next paragraph almost sounds like that. We are probably talking past each other to some degree here.
I don't know. Your theory perhaps says that Blinken does not look like Napoleon because the true Napoleon is hiding elsewhere. I think that a theory along the lines of "Blinken is a modern Napoleon, and in the current environment and/or presence of a larger number of competing Napoleons that's just as effective as a Napoleon gets" would also be sufficient to explain the observations.
It's easier to shoot yourself in the foot if you are the one with the rusty rifle prone to go off at random.
I think it's too early to tell if Zero Covid is actually a footbullet for China. I think it was actually you who argued for the Afghanistan "blunder" as being the sort of blunder that actually only serves to prove the might of those that commit it (perhaps comparable to the blunder that is Las Vegas in Scott's Moloch piece?). How do we know that Zero Covid is not this for China, whose chosen civilisational path is now based on keeping its own people in a tight line? They may have sacrificed some economical growth, but they surely gained a lot of experience in how to pull this sort of thing off, and more importantly established common knowledge that they can, and resistance will amount to nothing.
I for my part believe it's more of a principal-agent problem. The European elite, as I have experienced it, largely consists of American clients and opportunists and I'm very sure that few of the politicians currently ruining the EU's energy supply will personally suffer any adverse consequences for this. For the US to achieve this in the wake of WWII did not require any particularly advanced plays, just the extreme discrepancy in treasure that was naturally present between a bombed-out, partitioned continent and a united intact one with the aforementioned perfect production and logistics base.
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If it were true, Napoleon's romantic novel would be known as masterpiece belonging to the pinnacle of world's literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clisson_et_Eug%C3%A9nie
Yes, Napoleon like every young man of his time, dreamed to be a romantic artist and worked on it as hard as he worked on everything else. The result is ... similar what would happen if Goethe was given command of an army.
Napoleon is no exception - numerous great and accomplished men - politicians, generals, businessmen, scientists, etc... wrote memoirs of their lives. How many of them are known for their literary, artistic value?
Was he known as rising star in the world of journalism and politics?
Are "Are You Listening, D.H. Lawrence?" and "The New Left" known for their genius insight?
(anyway, political genius would pick other place to start his career than McGovern campaign)
Power? Job of modern politician is office job that consists of meetings and endless powerpoint presentations, job where you are as easily replaceable cog of machine as in every other job.
Nerd serf worth six figure pay could be fired, could be cancelled and blacklisted if he fucks up badly, and in this is no different from politician (except that the politician would fall much harder).
People interested in raw up your face "powah" become cops, border or prison guards, this is work where you can bully and brutalize your fellow human beings with impunity.
Does non-existence of distinct specialized talents eliminate the role of experience, including experience of your and your family's network? Does the «job» of someone like Putin or Xi consist of powerpoint presentations? And since when is political power (a separate notion from «political office») a job at all, isn't this a hyperstition that commoners (very reasonably, but with incomplete success) try to force onto the class of masters? Do you assert that Derek Chauvin is psychologically the modern day Caesar, while the modern day's intellectual peer of Caesar is fiddling with Haskell monads, and there is no intersection of those categories?
You probably do not. But this is the level of your intellectually dishonest, motivated nitpicking that is not responsive to what I have said.
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You bring up the nature index.
The number one institution on the Nature Index is the Chinese Academy of Sciences, followed by Harvard. Three Chinese and three American universities were in the top 10, as of 2020. The top 44 'rising stars' are all Chinese. Chinese science is doing pretty well according to Nature:
I don't see how a Taiwanese billionaire spending 32 million will change much. That's something like 0.015% of China's defence budget.
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That's funny. When you've spoken about the powers that be before, I've wanted to suggest you check out The Second Apocalypse. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, that seems like the kind of thing that would be commonly brought up in a book club thread here.
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Have you ever described, in more detail, your horrified vision of the future under an ascendant US-led singleton with AGI? Because I'm curious.
Not really, no.
I suspect you're being coy. Are you disavowing this and saying it's just lifted from fiction, because to actually endorse this vision of dystopia would look too Alex Jones-y?
I am being coy but I am also frankly saying that as of yet there is no elucidation of my views on this matter, at least not one that I'd welcome being linked to this identity.
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In 1989 USSR was clearly rotting to the point that it was likely noticed even by mass media in USA.
It was even starting to be noticed by Soviets, by that point.
September 1989 was when Yeltsin made headlines by visiting a random US grocery store and being so astonished that he thought it might be a Potemkin fake, because "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev." He predicted "there would be a revolution" if average Soviet consumers all saw what he was seeing.
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I don't think it matters if they get an ASML machine. What they need is the support contract, and that is part of what is unavailable to "Chinese military companies".
To put it another way, if someone gave you (and generously, your friends) a space shuttle and all the relevant infrastructure, would you be able to launch it within five years? There's going to be some critical knowledge of the cockpit or the refueling system or the inspections process that you can't figure out.
With ASML, we're talking about machines the size of a shipping container, with mechanical parts that are calibrated to move wafers at the nanoscale, but which otherwise dampen vibrations, high-performance lasers that won't even work in a standard atmosphere, which require a continuous flow of high-purity chemicals only made in one or two countries, and all depend on proprietary software which probably gets custom modules built and delivered based on the needs of the customer whose fab it sits in. If the servos or beam-line or vacuum gets misaligned, or get slightly over-spec on dust, or some chemical formula changes slightly, or some part burns out prematurely, then it's not going to get the 5 nm resolution which it was sold for.
So yeah, I think this is the end of Xi's China. They can go through a trade war, their economy can sputter along, but China's industrial development is doomed to go the way of the USSR: pulling off epic feats of engineering and brainpower just to keep their existing (high-speed) trains running, while the West gets to start reaping the benefits of software eating the world.
Well, of course the West will still come up with 50 different philosophical and political reasons to justify shooting itself in the foot, but when it does its gun will be equipped with computer-controlled sights.
How is it bad that the Chinese are pulling off epic feats of engineering, creating a bigger high speed rail network than the rest of the world combined (and using their own companies to do so)? Being able to do mega-engineering is good actually - it compares very well to the American experience. A NYT article went viral the other day describing the French companies working in Cali who gave up and decided to move somewhere less politically dysfunctional - like North Africa.
I only link breitbart because the NYT is paywalled:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/09/french-rail-company-quit-california-for-less-dysfunctional-north-africa/
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Yes. They were trying with their usual stratagems and have come up empty.
I'm not sure how deeply you've looked into that. But «machine» is a bit of a misnomer, like calling 16-inch/50-caliber Mark 7 a «gun» or Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C an «engine» or maybe even Bagger 293 a «power shovel». TWINSCAN NXE:3600D has grown beyond anything that can be understood as a mere tool. There are very few of them in existence, each constructed with salivating contractors in a queue, each takes dozens of freight containers to transport and a small army of technicians to serve. ASML is similar to the Guild in Last Exile (or Navigators in Dune, if I'm to be less precise but more understandable) – their offering is maximally scarce, absolutely necessary to have a fighting chance, and impossible to slip through the cracks. They'd have loved to sell to the PRC, but it won't happen.
I'm pretty sure the navigators were called the Guild in Dune as well.
Yes, they were pretty much referred to mainly as "the Guild" in the first two books. The Navigators themselves are just a part of the Guild, there's also bankers and other non-mutated humans who do stuff in it.
Another analogy: ComStar, or if you will, the Mechanicus.
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Ironically within much of the English speaking armed forces, "gun" is specifically reserved for artillery, not small arms.
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If China could get those machines they would have done so already. The fact they still only have very low tech abilities today speaks volumes
China is at multiple tipping points already and won’t be a major world force in a decade thanks to major demographic changes. It’s just math, no need to argue
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Depends on, if in this context, strength is the ability to impose one’s will, or the ability to endure pain. Trump knew Afghanistan was a lost cause, and that the stay crowd were akin to beaten stockbrokers insisting no loss would actually be realized until they closed their position. But his favorite generals told him he would look bad, so he chickened out and kicked the can down the road.
Biden decided to eat the poop sandwich, and endure performative rage about 13 dead U.S. soldiers that dwarfs whatever anger remains about the first 2,400 that were killed. He correctly figured if he did it at the start of his term, people would be focused on other concerns come the 2024 campaign, if not midterms.
His polling after that took a huge hit and never recovered. It shattered the feeling that he was competent. In hindsight he would've been better kicking it down the road to December 2022.
It took a hit, yes. That it did not recover is due to a multitude of other factors. Inflation, calling out for dead congresswomen, etc.
And, ripping the bandaid off after 20 years of occupation produced a government that couldn’t last a week on its own was the most competent thing Biden has done. I know it inflamed the wounded nationalism of some, upset the NatSec sources many in the press rely upon, and turned off a $2.3 trillion tap, which the military industrial complex was momentarily angry about (until Russia invaded Ukraine). But, it’s not something that’s currently polling among voters with any significance.
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few? probably. As many as they were acquiring so far? I am less sure.
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I'll shill Chinatalk as a good source of info and analysis, apparently it was one of their people who posted that big twitter thread, translating some Chinese commentary about how significant the blow was.
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/export-controls-xis-s-and-t-dreams?publication_id=4220&post_id=78583462&isFreemail=true
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/china-responds-to-chip-export-controls?publication_id=4220&post_id=78891054&isFreemail=true
I think military action is locked in, it's only a matter of timing. Once China fills out more of its new ICBM fields, once their new ballistic missile subs are deployed - then they'll feel confident in their strategic deterrent. Right now their missile subs are old and don't have the range to hit the US from home waters. New missile subs will start being deployed around 2024-5.
Many people have been arguing that these next few years are extremely dangerous for the US camp. China has been expanding its navy while the US fleet shrinks, China's fleet is young and concentrated whilst the US fleet is old and dispersed all around the world. Now that a good chunk of the US military is hovering around in Eastern Europe and ammunition stockpiles have been drained, there is probably even more of an opportunity for the Chinese.
Of course, China has issues in getting the necessary sealift capacity and the US retains an advantage in attack subs. However, Taiwan is 90% dependent on food imports and is even more dependent on foreign energy imports. There is no country worse prepared for a naval blockade IMO - China is basically self-sufficient on food once you account for them not exporting - plus they can buy from Eurasian markets. Energy is more troublesome for China but not insoluble if they shut down some industry (given they won't be exporting so much that'll happen anyway).
TSMC is an absolutely dominant semiconductor producer (pic related), it makes a lot of sense for the Chinese to deny them to the US bloc if they can't hope to profit from their work. China doesn't want to fall behind in AI and high-tech weapons.
/images/16661369878189542.webp
China being self sufficient on food? Okay I can safely dismiss you as knowing nothing about China. They import close to 80 percent of their food and their strategic grain reserves are mostly spoiled thanks to corruption (a major problem across their entire economy, government and military much like Russia). China is just as vulnerable as Taiwan and would get absolutely destroyed by a blockade due to total dependency on food and energy imports
That's just not true. They import $100 billion worth of food, mostly luxurious stuff like meat and export 60 billion.
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-food-security/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/03/russia-ukraine-conflict-has-a-limited-impact-on-chinas-food-supply-analysts-say.html
Or take this article which spends about 6 paragraphs catastrophizing Chinese agriculture and then says their self-sufficiency is dropping from 94% to 91%!
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-out-china-cannot-feed-itself-opinion-1575948
China is very nearly food-secure and can import food overland, along with rationing, farmland rationalization away from luxuries and so on. Don't call me an idiot when you're the one who's wrong.
https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/blogs/agriculture/060722-china-climate-change-food-security
Read the full article, China has major issues with being able to feed its population. It’s 33rd in the world ranked for food security, and a naval blockade would easily destroy that further.
Overland? You do realize the insane logistics of trying to get food across an entire continent as large as Asia all while fighting a war would be? There’s a reason why all major cargo is transported via ship. Costs would be astronomical otherwise.
China does not create much “luxury food” either. Their main animal products are seafood, good luck fishing when all your boats have been confiscated
What do you think they're importing all those soybeans are for? They're feed for animals, particularly hogs. In world wars, meat production gets slashed because it's not efficient. They slaughter most of their herds for a short-term source of food and rebuild them later. What matters is basics, wheat and rice production. China can do that. Taiwan cannot. Taiwan's food self-sufficiency is 30%! That's what you'd expect from an island that's essentially half mountain, half city.
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2019/12/01/2003726744#:~:text=This%20is%20a%20praiseworthy%20initiative,in%20Taiwan%20exceeded%20590%2C000%20tonnes.&text=Ignoring%20the%20fact%20that%20about,low%20compared%20with%20other%20countries.
Russia is a big food exporter and has good relations with China. It's only that China didn't want to import food as part of their self-sufficiency goals (wheat imports from Russia were banned until 2021), in wartime they absolutely would buy wheat from Russia. The only thing that Russia doesn't do is soybeans, which China doesn't critically need since they're for animal feed.
https://www.oedigital.com/news/494670-inside-trade-from-energy-to-food-china-russia-trade-has-surged-in-recent-years
Furthermore, the Chinese have been spending hundreds of billions building a gigantic Eurasian infrastructure network. The whole point of One Belt One Road is to ensure China has access to these markets and can ensure supplies of food and other resources by rail if necessary. They could also have third parties ship their food to some reasonably friendly country like Cambodia or Myanmar, then transport it overland. It's expensive but not impossible to get around a blockade for a roughly 91% self-sufficient land power - Taiwan is completely fucked at 30%. Japan is around 38% and will have some issues.
http://english.agrinews.co.jp/?p=9725
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That is true.
[citation needed]
And makes me unsure about your 80% claim
Not true at all. They are a net food importer. Not to mention massive drought due to water mismanagement and bad weather has decimated their agriculture.
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A blockade isn't as easy as it sounds on paper. Under international law, a blockade is considered an act of war, and China would be under immediate pressure to clarify whether it is indeed at war with Taiwan. If it says yes, then it implicitly recognizes the independence of Taiwan. If it says no, then other countries are free to ignore the blockade. But formalities aside, I would expect that the Chinese come up with some sophisticated rigamorole to dodge the issue, and that the US doesn't buy it. The US and its allies would try to resolve the situation diplomatically while moving the entire Pacific fleet into the area. If the issue isn't resolved, then the US would take a stance that the blockade is illegal and start escorting resupply convoys into Taiwan's harbors. This puts the Chinese in a real jam—if it allows the ships to pass then it it effectively capitulates and is exposed as a paper tiger; if it tries to enforce the blockade it risks starting World War III. And US involvement in Taiwan's defense is practically guaranteed since the opening shots were fired at a US vessel and not Taiwan itself. A blockade just gives the US time to build up a presence in the area and presents a risk that an actual shooting war will be against the US and not Taiwan. I'm not saying that this necessarily will happen, but the blockade strategy seems inherently more risky than just invading all at once while the US is preoccupied elsewhere and hope they don't get involved militarily.
PRC + TW legally in ongoing civil war experiencing a period of detente.
It's almost trivially easy.
Practically, PRC can simply mine TW ports, crater run ways, via overwhelming glide mines and MLRS all within PRC borders (that can hit anywhere in TW + adjacent). US + co doesn't remotely have the demining, sealift or airlift capacity to logistically support TW off PRC waters. Nor will they convince any commercial fleet/insurers to go on suicide mission of... invading One China territory. It's like how Operation Starvation crippled JP during WW2. Except TW is much smaller than JP and PRC is a much larger industrial power than US during wartime. PRC can unilaterally render TW inaccessible - it can blockade TW with basically zero sustained naval or air effort and shift risk to US actions. And really if US/JP try to run the blockade they're legally invading into Chinese sovereign territory and it's WW3 anyway. TW may have chance to survive a PLA invasion, but IMO no chance of breaking a PRC blockade. Folks are grossly underestimating the proponderous of advantages PRC has off her coast.
You just put more assets within PRC A2D2 bubble. Safe distance for US surface fleet is beyond 1st island chain right now.
There's also the political dimension of A) wanting to favourable localized war with US where PRC has advantage. B) worthwhile to gamble US inaction which will reverabate within region on status of US capability/commitment.
If your "blockade" requires lobbing missiles at your opponent just to get it off the ground, then I think you've already gotten to the hot war stage. And this isn't "trivially easy"; Taiwan has hundreds of missiles capable of hitting the Chinese mainland, and they're ramping up production as we speak. If Taiwan starts getting hit you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be retaliatory strikes against the Chinese mainland, regardless of whether the US intervenes or not. Even still, once China takes any action the effect on shipping isn't going to be limited to Taiwanese ports; all cargo in the area is going to become uninsurable. China will be hit with sanctions, but it probably won't matter since their biggest ports will be out of commission anyway.
Blockade IS a hot war already. The concern isn't hot war with TW, but hot war with US by deterring US intervention. Start with mining to disable harbours which is grayscale enough not to be considerd "kinetic" but more than enough to stop bulk energy/calorie goods. Shifts onus on TW to escalate to homeland strikes. Cratering runways is just exta level of petty that prevents strategic materials from being Berlin airlifted.
Why would PRC hit shipping not bound for TW, i.e. engage in commercial ships within 12nm of TW/PRC territorial waters? There were old studies about redirecting shipping east of TW outside of Chinese EEZ with increased fuel + insurance costs measured in low double digit percentages. As someone who followed this space for 20+ years, the narrative that war in TW strait or adjacent will ruin regional shipping was propaganda for giving TW greater significance prior to semiconductors.
...
As with resumption of PRC TW hotwar, having mainland hit by TW is assumed. In Syria, US launched ~100 cruise missiles / TLAMs for 8 small targets, of which non trivial amounts were intercepted using antiquated RU anti air systems. Estimates for # of missiles needed to degrade PRC's SCS bases is high several 100s, i.e. significant % of USN's deployed VLS in region. Extensive concrete infra soaks a lot of hits. In UKR almost 4000? (have not kept up to date) RU missiles did managable damage on UKR war capacity. UKR has fraction of a fraction worth of targest relative to PRC and even less ability to recover. You're grossly overestimating the damage potential of TW stockpiles.
Just from a weaponeering perspective, TW has minimal capacity to take out an impactful amount of PRC infra, especially huge ports, which PRC can repair rapidly because TW can't generate high volume of fires in a single salvo, while their stockpiles even with projected acquistions are still paltry, which wouldn't survive PRC retaliatory fire anyway. Assuming the they can launch a surprise salvo without being discovered - there's limited places on a small island that is heavily monitored to bunker/prep launchers. TW can crank defense spending to 10% of GDP and island still won't have capacity to conventionally degreate PRC in any meaningful or prolonged way. The quantity (and current quality) differential is just that great, i.e. PRC aviation can drop 1000s of mines on TW ports in one sortie. It's not the preferred blockade scenario in terms of strategic flexibility, but in terms of blockading the island into sealed crypt, it is that trivially easy.
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They can say it's a 'police action' (the US version of the 'special military operation'). Nobody declares wars anymore. The US last declared war on Romania in WW2.
The US has traditionally tried to be ambiguous on its Taiwan strategy as part of a mixed strategy. The Chinese have a tonne of ballistic missiles they'd use to attempt to destroy US forces on Yokohama, Guam and so on at the start of the war. But that obviously brings US and Japan into the war. If the Chinese just attack Taiwan first, then they risk the US pacific fleet intervening in good order. US would prefer that they don't get struck first so they retain those forces - but they don't want to say that they won't defend Taiwan and then betray that word. Thus the word-games
Imagine a naval war between the US and Chinese fleets. Food and fuel isn't being shipped in to Taiwan during that time. Even as the oceans are contested, it's still an effective blockade. Perhaps the Chinese don't want to risk a disastrous marine landing until they've secured total naval and air superiority, that could take a while.
I don't know that a Pearl Harbor style preemptive attack on a powerful country you aren't at war with is a great strategy. An ambivalence among the American public about entering a war to defend Taiwan is going to go out the window after missile attacks on US territory. It also opens the door to retaliatory strikes on the Chinese mainland; every Chinese naval base between Macau and Shanghai would be at risk. It also pretty much guarantees international sanctions against China, at a time when one of the most-traveled shipping lanes in the world is effectively shut down. It would be tough, but the rest of the world can afford to take that hit. The Chinese economy can't, given that it's almost entirely export-based. You're right to say that gaining air and naval superiority could take a while, but that's the problem, and given that blockades in general take a while to get results, it leads me to believe that China won't try this. I'm not saying that a blockade necessarily won't work, mind you, but simply that it's not the obvious slam dunk that some people on the internet make it out to be.
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You're forgetting the One China Policy. States which do not recognize Taiwan also cannot officially recognize that China is at war with Taiwan. Blockading the island is, formally, merely an internal police matter. You're probably right that the US would ultimately run the blockade, though.
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Just FYI, that chart at the bottom only counts foundry revenue. Of the top three, Intel doesn’t do foundry, Samsung is both foundry and IDM, tsmc is foundry only - so no wonder the chart shows them “leading”. In total revenue all three should be roughly similar.
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Regarding the sealift situation, things might be less optimistic for Taiwan on that front than previously thought. https://warontherocks.com/2022/10/mind-the-gap-part-2-the-cross-strait-potential-of-chinas-civilian-shipping-has-grown/
Uninformed amateur: is it hard to sink civilian ferries used as troop transports?
Not particularly. Then again it's not really hard to sink military grade amphibious warfare ships either.
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Interesting read. Those 2.4 million tonnes of sealift capacity sound like a lot, I'm surprised that only translates to 60,000 troops in the first wave. I suppose they're moving a lot of ammo and light vehicles.
Those 60,000 troops come from using Heavy Combined Arms Brigades as a metric for sealift and estimating about 8 of those in the first wave. The estimate deliberately picked the biggest, heaviest brigade level option probably to demonstrate just how much heavy, expensive, logistically intense stuff Beijing could bring across the strait. That's a lot of tanks, artillery and support equipment in that estimate, not just 60,000 guys with QBZ-191s.
For some reason I got mixed up between the bit where he says 'most likely split between lighter brigades' and the eight heavy brigades + 60,000 quote. It's a weird way to say things - do 60,000 troops comprise 8 heavy brigades? Those would be big for brigades, more like small divisions. Anyway, it's the heavy marine brigades that would be first onto the beach anyway, yet they aren't mentioned.
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My greatest hope with these export controls are that they're merely graft. Biden has been championing the domestic semiconductor industry, with Congress granting tens of billions in subsidies to build domestic manufacturing. Maybe he's getting a kickback from the companies that benefit. Not the actual semiconductor companies, but the firms and unions involved in constructing and maintaining these specific facilities.
The alternative is that this is preparation for imminent war. The administration are not so dumb that they think this will permanently hinder Chinese industry. I've seen experts forecast that they'll probably be able to develop what they need in 2-3 years.
Why disrupt American industry so greatly for a mere 2-3 years of strategic advantage?
As Gwern points out, this may provoke a response from China. America dictating to a Taiwanese company that it can't sell its wares to China certainly seems like a violation of at least the spirit of the vague One China policy. That's a policy that the West already gets almost all of the benefit from. All China gets out of it is face-saving. The West and Taiwan get to treat Taiwan like a country in every way except name. They even get to have diplomatic relations, and embassies, just by another name.
What would America do if China controlled a vast amount of the world's rare earth mineral mines and decided that they'll no longer sell the products of those mines to America or its allies? Wait, they already do control a vast amount of rare earth minerals. Maybe that's the next step in this dumb escalatory spiral.
What if it were laughably trivial, and instead China secured exclusive access to all avocados grown south of the United States border? Would the United States do nothing?
Curious, given that they tried to achieve this for much longer and consistently failed.
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If they still had access to the Semi tooling industry, then they’d be close to the design rules that other top-tier fabs (Samsung, tsmc, Intel sorta) are at now. They made huge leaps by stealing info, masks, and staff. Without that access to the tooling market, though, they’re dead in the water. If someone tells you that anyone can develop new Semi tooling in that kind of time frame, just stop reading.
This is a huge blow. I, for one, am cheering on the west to take lead again in this industry. I’ve been wishing it privately for a long time now, and I’m especially glad to stop selling to fascists.
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That's what the Chinese did to Japan during the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, they suspended rare earth exports.
One thing about rare earths (or any resource really) is that there is a nearly unlimited supply at the right price. While China could hamper some industry temporarily, there are plenty of rare Earths available elsewhere, they just aren't economical to extract at current prices.
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Reopen Mountain Pass?
That’s what I am conflicted about. Sure, there is no fundamental reasons why the west/US couldn’t mine and extract its own lithium, so that it’s not dependent on China. But, would it actually be able to do it in practice? Would the overcome the political, NIMBY, environmental, ecological etc opposition? Can they actually get necessary know how and workforce to build what is needed?
Consider the current energy crisis in Europe. Seems like the obvious answer would be to just go all in on nuclear fission. Is this what is happening? No, European countries seem like to be more into trying to survive winter, expanding LNG terminals, and hoping that there is enough LNG capacity in future. Will there be? Can they depend on their US ally providing all of it? No, US is still not pushing hard into expanding fossils, instead we still go all in on ESG.
Seems to me that even if it is clear what needs to be done, the ability to actually pull it off is no longer there, there is no leader to pull the Realpolitik off and align everyone towards the goal. Instead, we get the standard multitude of interest groups that just makes everything impossible to build, as usual.
Even the greens have at least stopped digging when it comes to the nuclear power hole.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.smh.com.au/world/europe/german-greens-suspend-nuclear-opposition-ahead-of-winter-power-threat-20221017-p5bq9s.html
I think it's one thing to build new power plants and another to start mining an existing mine again.
Germany is not even able to keep their existing power plants open during energy crisis in the face of opposition from the greens. I don’t think reopening a mine closed for more than a decade is going to be any easier.
They, in fact, are able to keep their existing nuclear plants open.
https://apnews.com/article/business-germany-olaf-scholz-christian-lindner-cda1fd82ab1be344ee60ecd67a10f15a
Barely. As the other post mentioned, it's only until April, but, more importantly, it's only three locations for which no new fuel will be purchased. That means that in January at the latest all three plants will have to greatly reduce their power output in order to be able to run all the way into April, at least according to the company maintaining operations.
It should also be mentioned that this decision was only reached after months of discussion. As late as two days ago it seemed plausible that the original end date (the new year) would stay simply because the parties in the governing coalition couldn't agree on this. It has only happened now because the chancellor used a special and very rarely used provision in German law that allows him to shutdown any debate within the (executive branch of the) government on its course of action.
Meh, FWIW, I think most of the Greens just resisted publicly to appease their base, but didn't really. Habeck has been running around arranging gas deals with UAE and Qatar, and Baerbock has been shipping weapons to the Ukraine, both of which would have been unthinkable for Green's just a year ago. He has scolded the public for wanting unrealistic energy solutions.
Apparently the issue was resolved in four minutes when the cabinet met; hardly the sign of firm opposition.
Perhaps I'm too optimistic, and the anti-nuclear segments are too strong, but I think the Greens have grown up somewhat, due to actually having power and having to deal with a crisis.
Also, the country is facing up to the fact that it's likely to be a tough winter -- many townships in Bavaria are putting out disaster preparedness advisories, warning of potential power and water outages.
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Nasrudin was caught in the act and sentenced to die. Hauled up before the king, he was asked by the Royal Presence: "Is there any reason at all why I shouldn't have your head off right now?" To which he replied: "Oh, King, live forever! Know that I, the mullah Nasrudin, am the greatest teacher in your kingdom, and it would surely be a waste to kill such a great teacher. So skilled am I that I could even teach your favorite horse to sing, given a year to work on it." The king was amused, and said: "Very well then, you move into the stable immediately, and if the horse isn't singing a year from now, we'll think of something interesting to do with you."
As he was returning to his cell to pick up his spare rags, his cellmate remonstrated with him: "Now that was really stupid. You know you can't teach that horse to sing, no matter how long you try." Nasrudin's response: "Not at all. I have a year now that I didn't have before. And a lot of things can happen in a year. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die.
"And, who knows? Maybe the horse will sing."
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Nice, that gives me some hope for the future of Western civilization.
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...until April...
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'Economic action'...this is very broad.
very unlikely
probably not good
very unlikely
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Interesting thread on the ssc subreddit from two months ago, which argues that this measures will actually benefit the Beijing regime. Reasoning being that this will create a market free of US competition, ready made for Chinese companies. A measure which China imposed on itself regarding the internet companies, leading to the success of domestic companies such as Alibaba.
Not sure I follow.
The argument is that banning export of a specific product creates a big incentive. That seems reasonable in a free market. But to what extent is the Chinese domestic market free? They could have banned Xeon imports themselves.
China wants, very badly, to have top tier fabrication. The fact that they haven’t gone full protectionist suggests that it isn’t the most efficient way to get what they want, probably because it would stall all the dependent industries in the meantime. I think the Internet was a different story: controlled for social reasons, and the market for Alibaba was a secondary effect.
If China REALLY wants top tier fabrication, they just have to..
..to what? Invade Occupied East China?
That construction is interesting, who would you say is occupying East China?
I was referencing the Chinese claim that Taiwan is part of China, and thus that American presence onshore would be an occupation.
It's impressive occupying the territory with only 29 marines, 2 soldiers, 3 sailors and 5 airmen. Quite the coup.
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If that goes as well as they can expect, it gives them only the ruins of top-tier fabrication. They can't literally blitzkreig Taiwan and take it intact.
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I get the "just build your own right-wing Twitter / web host / credit card processor" reference, but I don't know if most would.
I meant they could invade Taiwan
I'm pretty hesitant to make any predictions about whether China will or won't invade or blockade Taiwan and what the outcomes are likely to be, except for one thing: if China invades Taiwan and looks likely to prevail at any point, then I am confident that TSMC will not survive the conflict. The West will make sure that it doesn't, if it comes down to it. There's no world where China successfully commandeers TSMC.
Bear with my ignorance for a while.
But wouldn't destroying TSMC be suicidal?
My (ignorant) hypothetical is that China isn't stupid, if they get their hands on TSMC they won't close it off they will probably try to continue selling chips and capturing some of the profits. There's just too much money left on the table otherwise.
Why would The West just rid the world of a majority of semiconductor production just for realpolitik? They will have to bear the (opportunity) cost of that as well. The alternative would probably be just paying more some chips. And China becoming more advanced. But that seems infinitely more desirable than losing 60-80% of the worlds chip manufacturing.
So given that its so undesirable, now that I think of it, that's exactly what they might do being governments.
Yeah, I guess my mental model of US strategic planning is that IF China is going to commit such a massive defection as to seize TSMC by force, THEN we'd much rather no one have it than that China has it and can decide who is allowed to use it and on what terms. The US has struck a major blow against China recently with our semiconductor export restrictions, basically revealing that our goal is to permanently constrain China's advancement into modern ML tech, and I can't imagine that we'd allow China to reverse the gradient of that dynamic through the use of military force. I think we're past the point where we look at China as just another economic player with whom we can achieve a win-win, and we're now well into the politics of great power rivalry, at least with respect to high-powered machine learning chips.
Would destroying TSMC be suicidal? No -- we'd survive without it. We wouldn't have as many nice things for the next ten years, and we'd probably set back our AGI timeline by 5-10 years, and I don't mean to downplay those concerns, but preventing China from pulling even or ahead of the US in this strategic tech frontier is probably an order of magnitude more important by our policymakers' values. IMO.
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tsmc doesn’t produce 60% of the world’s chips. They just make a lot of money from being the best design-rule foundry (along with Samsung). Most chips being produced use larger design rules, and are much cheaper. The other two companies that match them technologically don’t make their money from being a foundry.
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The west would destroy TSMC in such a case because while there would be a ton of short-term hurt, it would make west-aligned fabs like Samsung and Intel even stronger. Also the west has been making deals with TSMC to build fabs outside of Taiwan (Japan, Arizona) in part so that they have the option to blow the whole fab up in the case of a Chinese invasion.
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Exactly. If there are adults running the show they'll have planned where to put the explosives, have aircraft standing by and know the schools key TSMC employees kids will go to.
What are you suggesting? That they should kill the employees' kids?
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