Orwell was right
Washington’s ever-tougher trade sanctions against China, mainly restricting the export of chip technology, is straining relations between the two countries to breaking point, and increasingly forcing their allies to take sides.
It’s not just US companies such as Nvidia, which would love to flood the all-important Chinese market with its specialized chips for the development of artificial intelligence. Companies from other countries, such as ASML, the Netherlands-based manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet lithography manufacturing equipment, is also prevented from selling to China. Each of its machines is a monster costing hundreds of millions of euros and occupying several containers and requiring three Boeing 747s to transport them; the inability to sell to the Chinese market is a huge setback, which could soon see other competitors taking advantage of the opportunity to clone its its products.
We will soon see how a Congressional initiative supported by both Republicans and Democrats, led by President Biden, fares in requiring that the Chinese owner of TikTok, ByteDance, must divest and sell to a US company if it wants to avoid a ban on operating in the United States.
The initiative, which seems destined to be approved this time and which has already attracted several potential buyers, will most likely come to nothing, given the Chinese government’s frontal…
