This is downvoted, but really too mild. The idea of the chip curb is to force China to develop domestic replacements, which will cause industrial espionage to go up. When you declare economic war on a nation, you can expect them to ramp up spending on industrial espionage quite a bit. Not sure why this is so controversial.
Are you suggesting that, before these sanctions, China was not putting 100% effort into industrial espionage because they had access to all of the tech, but now that they have less access they will be more invested in industrial espionage?
That seems kind of backwards to me. My read of the sanctions is that intelligence indicated that the presence of this tech was accelerating China's (largely espionage-based) development, so the policy answer was to reduce access to the tech.
furthermore they tend to push harder against sanctions when they happen.
many of the most well known sanctioned nations (north korea, iran, turkiye, etc.) have just made their own stuff to varying degrees, based on how much they aren't allowed to buy.
furthermore bigger nations like china can fire back hard if need be.
we saw how europe's sanctions against russia were met with gas denial.
all in all, sanctions usually don't do much outside of wartime other than piss off the target of said sanctions, and actually push them to rely on you less.
Why is the fact they spend more hand waved away as not an affect? Forcing them to spend more in one area lowers their ability to spend in other areas, warfare since the industrial era has been about logistics and who can put produce the other side
1. In the case of china, we are forcing them to spend more on very high tech, strategic investments, effectively accelerating their march up the value chain.
2. It's true that there is a cost in the extra R&D spending, but there is also a cost in the lost revenue of western chip makers. NVIDIA is going to take a bath -- that will cut into their R&D budget, etc.
So we are also imposing costs on our own R&D spending while accelerating the R&D spending of our adversary - and let's just admit that China is an adversary.
This is a very strange departure from how these types of trade wars have been historically waged. Normally if you want to hurt some countries' industry and help your own, you put a tariff on their stuff and you subsidize your stuff. E.g. make it harder for China to sell their cars here and easier to sell your cars there. You encourage more exports and discourage imports.
What we are doing now is making it harder to sell our stuff there, but no tariff on the importation of Chinese chips into the U.S. So we are discouraging exports without blocking imports. And this policy is supposed to hurt China and help the US, which I find completely baffling.
This is, unfortunately, par for the course with sanctions mania, where the only policy lever we appear to have with anyone is sanctions. These sanctions are economically disastrous for the US and for Western nations generally. The only thing I can think of is that because we don't see the impact when we sanction small nations such as Cuba, we think there will still be no impact when we sanction big economies. But there is an impact, and future economic historians will look on this period of sanctions as being far more economically suicidal than the mania on trade barriers. Because a sanction is just a one way trade barrier -- directed only at yourself and your own industry.
