Huawei, which has been under U.S. sanctions for years, released the phone pointedly during Gina Raimondo’s visit to Beijing
As Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was visiting China earlier this week, a sea-green Chinese smartphone was quietly launched online.
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.
Tighten the restrictions again please. Back China into a corner so that they can innovate themselves out of it and we can have some proper competition. This is great news.
What a dumb assumption to make that China would crumble without Western tech. Do they think the rest of the world would just return to the dark ages ? Do they believe non-Westerners can't think? So dumb.
It won't really be good for anyone for the CCP to become stronger, it means the world will continue to get dragged towards authoritarianism, perhaps permanently after the technology of oppression has progressed beyond a certain point.
Competition is always good for the consumers. Having two authoritarian country competing means you can at least diversify where your data goes. Both will be trying to be at the top of the pyramid and products will get cheaper.
People will figure out a way to use them without the backdoors. Like how people currently buy cheap chinese phones and install LineageOS, or how people de-google with e/os/ or Graphene OS. Hardware backdoors will be a problem as they always have been but even they can be reverse engineered and patched.
If West or China is hostile to your country and threat model, use tech from the other side, and vice versa.
The west and especially US likes to sanction countries that don't bend over for them and everyone joins in because they are afraid of the same retaliation. Every country is realizing that it's not in their best interest to be a lapdog for a single super power. This opens up opportunities for bargains and not be on chokehold as it is now.
It'll be worrying if a single entity becomes the sole global leader in tech.
You assume too much, yourself. I think the point is the U.S. finally realized they were giving away critical technology to a nation that not so secretly plans to replace them.
Unfortunately, I think they were asleep too long, and China has enough knowledge to press forward without stealing from Americans.
Now, America must accept the fact they fucked up and have to compete as equals, which is much more difficult.
Lol no. Hitler has nothing to do with it, and the racism that far predates him is always a factor, but isn't required in this case.
Professional innovators are delicate creatures that don't naturally do well in human societies. In the West, a rigid legal system has protected them from whatever established people they want to "disrupt" pretty much since WWII. In most other places, war and chaos (yes, thanks largely to the West) has disrupted that, and present day cronyism continues to hamper it.
The historical USSR was the same, good engineers making brilliant use of basic technologies and concepts developed in the West. There were no Soviet startups, and on the occasion researchers invented something new it tended to kind of go nowhere because they weren't appreciated fully by higher-ups. Their адрес programming language was invented 10 years ahead of C, but they finished the Cold War 10 years behind on computing.
It's absolutely bizarre that you grouped Taiwan and China together in this sentiment.
Taiwan being a silicon powerhouse is literally part of a deliberate strategy by western nations, especially the US, to combat Chinese manufacturing. They were supplied with science and technology. They have the license agreements. They're one of the cadre of nations that are currently waving protectionist flags against the "threat" of Chinese manufacturing.
It'd be like putting the Dutch in the list. Except even weirder, because there is not any semblance of abnormal diplomacy/hostility between Amsterdam and Beijing.
The hype is that it's using a domestic CPU. It's unclear how good a CPU it is, but apparently it was made with a semiconductor process which is only several years behind cutting edge. That's not really surprising, though, I doubt there was all that much "hushed concern".
I imagine there's also a question of if the Chinese can scale production up at all, or if some precision German machine tool is an impassible bottleneck.
Because it’s a sign they were able to get that manufacturing technology working. It means their equipment is better than it was up until very recently, and they were able to work out the kinks (mainly optics, iirc) stopping them from using ‘7nm’ nodes. It also means that the west is loosing the semiconductor production advantage it has.
Check out Asianometry, he does good videos on semiconductor manufacture, and I believe he did a video or two on China as well.
I looked at the previous 2 versions of this handset for my own use and didn't end up getting them. They have now dealt with most of the issues (no access to google play store apps etc) via Lighthouse, but it's still got a zany custom OS (EMUI) which features a bit of Chinglish and some pretty bizarre UI choices. The cameras are absolutely kickass in the Mate 50 pro, I would say better than iPhone 14 pro max without much hesitation at all.
On the downside, these devices almost certainly contain backdoors and may be phoning home regularly. The reality is, so is your Samsung, so is your Pixel, so is your iPhone. ALL of them have backdoors and are capable of recording and transmitting audio even when turned off. In this instance, I feel more comfortable giving a backdoor to the Chinese than any 5-eyes manufacturer. After all, what consequence is there for the Chinese to spy on me compared to my home country via a third party 5-eyes nation and their manufacturing partners? China has no bearing on my life.
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“The major geopolitical significance,” he said, “has been to show that it is possible to completely design [without] U.S. technology and still produce a product that may not be quite as good as cutting edge Western models, but is still quite capable.”
China’s official broadcaster, CGTN, in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, called the phone Huawei’s “first higher-end processor” since U.S. sanctions were imposed and said the chip it contains was made by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., a company partially owned by the Chinese government.
U.S. sanctions were intended to slow China’s progress in emerging fields like artificial intelligence and big data by cutting off its ability to buy or build advanced semiconductors, which are the brains of these systems.
“This shows that Chinese companies like Huawei still have plenty of capability to innovate,” said Chris Miller, a professor at Tufts University and author of the book “Chip War.” “I think it will also probably intensify debate in Washington on whether restrictions are to be tightened.”
“This development will almost certainly prompt much stronger calls for further tightening of export control licensing for U.S. suppliers of Huawei, who continue to be able to ship commodity semiconductors that are not used for 5G applications,” Triolo said.
For instance, Intel recently announced it will have to pay $353 million in termination fees to Israel’s Tower Semiconductor after failing to acquire Chinese regulatory approval for the acquisition.