Economic Warfare: Semi Conductors
The Biden administration destroys China without firing a shot.
Economic warfare is defined by Britannica as “the use of, or the threat to use, economic means against a country in order to weaken its economy”. It also goes on to say that “Economic warfare also includes the use of economic means to compel an adversary to change its policies or behavior or to undermine its ability to conduct normal relations with other countries”. On Friday October 7, 2022 the United States would deal a catastrophic blow to the Chinese Economy.
On October 7 the Bureau of Industry and Security released changes to the Export Administration Regulations. These new export controls restricts China’s ability to both purchase and manufacture high end semiconductor chips. So the US is attacking China’s ability to both get certain chips and attacking the highly sophisticated equipment used to make them. The controls also restricts US citizens from manufacturing chips in China. The new control comes in phases:
October 7 - The semiconductor manufacturing items restrictions.
October 12 - Restrictions on U.S. persons’ ability to support the.
development, production, or use of ICs at certain PRC-located semiconductor fabrication “facilities”.
October 21 - advanced computing and supercomputer controls, as well as the other changes in the rule.
Read for yourself:
So? What does this mean?
The US is restricting high to mid range tier chips from China. This means that they will be limited when it comes to manufacturing things like cellphones, computers, cars etc... China manufactures lots of low tier chips so It would be stupid to sanction that. Basically, they’re trying to send China back decades technology wise. No more hypersonics and “AI race”, no more competition.
The ball is in China’s court, what will they do now?
What about Taiwan?
What about it? Invading Taiwan does not fix their issues. I stated in my post The Truth about Semiconductors that “Invading a heavily armed island like Taiwan is no easy feat. Taiwan’s geography is very mountainous, meaning that you can’t just flood the island with troops, you will most likely have to destroy the whole thing. There’s no way you can guarantee the factories will be safe in a war like that so it’s a lose lose situation.”
Also, you need highly skilled workers and equipment to maintain and run those factories, China doesn’t have that. Invading Taiwan has almost zero strategic advantage at this point except death, more death and new sanctions.