China’s Complaints

China has been complaining a lot lately about the USA putting obstacles to China’s progress towards spawning a technically advanced chip industry.

The $250 billion Chips Act and science-related spending  will “disrupt international trade and distort global semiconductor supply chains,” complained Wang Wenbin of China’s foreign ministry, adding “China firmly opposes that.”

Wang said the spending would “restrict companies’ normal investment and economic and trade activities in China,” Wang.

A little later poor wretched Wang was wheeled out once again to complain about the ban on sales of advanced GPUs and AI chips to China. Wang’s complaint this time was that the US was imposing  a “technological blockade” on China aimed at maintaining America’s “technological hegemony”.

Another complaint was that the US banned the sales of EUV machines to China and talked about banning DUV machines 

Bai Ming, deputy director of international market research at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, drew the short straw on this one and was sent out to complain that the US government was mixing politics with normal business collaboration and harming the rights and interests of Chinese companies as well as US companies.

If China wants to break the US technological hegemony, or overcome a technological blockade or protect the rights and interests of Chinese companies, it should make the effort to make better chips than the US on better home-grown machinery.

China has tried to do that and fallen flat on its face. But the Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans make better chips than the Americans so why not China?

The answer is obvious: Japan, Taiwan and Korea are friendly companies and America was minded to help them..China is not friendly. It is a belligerent, bossy, bullying country and there’s absolutely no reason why America shouldn’t do whatever it thinks necessary to deny China the wherewithal for more belligerence, bossiness and  bullying.


Comments

10 comments

  1. They can’t even make decent monochrome LCDs for alarm clocks, a technology that has been around since the 70’s.

  2. I’d say Renesas has better automotive chips than the US, Mike

    • Not really. They’ve been lagging behind for quite some time.
      In the general MCU class for general functions (not self-driving, etc) I’d say the order is :

      NXP
      Infineon
      ST
      TI
      Renesas
      Microchip

      But ST is definitely one to watch with their Stellar range.

      • Mike,

        The MCU pecking order today is different: NXP, Microchip, Renesas, STM, Infineon. (source IC insights, 31 June 2022)..

        • Yes I keep seeing that order as well, which is suspiciously the same as the overall MCU market. Sorry but I don’t believe or accept it is correct for automotive (excluding self-driving where Intel and nVidia dominate). The companies themselves don’t break out the information in the same manner and all five are pretty close so it is always an estimate, but for me an easy test is this. If we assume ST and Infineon win equal amounts in foreign markets how many French cars are sold vs how many German cars ?

          Similarly TI state that more American cars have TI than Microchip in them. I haven’t seen Microchip state back on this.

          Renesas is largest in Japan, but they do buy in some from abroad otherwise they would be #1.

          The other one that gets ignored is Samsung who supply a huge number to the Korean manufacturers but never state anything, and who knows who supplies the Chinese car market ?

  3. I haven’t seen any Japanese chips that are better than American ones for some time now. Micron is definitely ahead of whatever Toshiba are calling themselves this week, and Renesas and the rest are definitely second tier.

  4. I couldn’t agree with you more, DontAgree, the Chinese have a b. cheek to complain.

  5. Geez that is a bit rich coming from the Chinese gov. ‘The $250 billion Chips Act and science-related spending will “disrupt international trade and distort global semiconductor supply chains,”’ their government has been pouring untold billions into trying to goose the local chip industry for decades on end …

    Not to mention the extremely predatory ‘laws’ they put in the books that all foreign companies establishing themselves in China must be a joint venture with a Chinese company and with a bunch of board members that are clearly strongly related to the CCP.

    Oh and that lovely law that says that such a joint venture must share any and all IP it owns with the Chinese ‘partner’. Not that that really matters because it is well known that Chinese companies will steal any IP they get their hands on, blatantly disregarding normal international IP ownership rules. The phrase “Chinese copy” is based on a very solid foundation.

    Another ridiculous statement: “the US government was mixing politics with normal business collaboration”, well duh and for the Chinese companies there is NO difference between company and politics. All (big) companies merely exist as a front for achieving the government goals. Who do they think they are fooling?

    It is high time that the rest of the world throw a (bigger) wrench in that machinery.

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