中文
By Hafijur Rahman
In a major blow to Washington's economic hegemony and increasing readiness to pursue a more independent policy, the Dutch government has snubbed U.S. demands to stop selling semiconductor equipment to China on November 22. In its desperate moves to stifle China's march toward tech preeminence and potentially destabilizing, revisionist efforts to salvage its beleaguered semiconductor industry, the U.S. issued sweeping export controls on China's access to the semiconductor technology. The move is the most drastic against any U.S. rival since the Cold War.
As semiconductor industry experts insist, the U.S. government is run by restrictionist zero-sum politicians who are clueless about the complex and split nature of the semiconductor supply chain. The restrictionists endorse the China-threat delirium and seek a return to America's bygone era of "unipolar moment"while failing to approximate the costs of the containment frenzy.
The nations' policy choices should be driven by their state interests, not to surrender to another country's hegemonic primacy; and the private sector interests should be driven by economics, not an alliance strategy or hegemonic coercion. As U.S. ever-escalating restrictive trade and tech policies against China have been driven by its self-interests to regain tech and economic hegemony, the policies have inflicted overwhelming collateral damage to industry stakeholders and the world.
Accordingly, Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher argued at the Dutch parliament, "It is important that we defend our own interests – our national safety, but also our economic interests." Even, forewarning the monumental costs of the Dutch going after the U.S. unilateral policy choice, she said, "If we (Dutch) put that in a European Unionbasket and negotiate with the United States and in the end, it turns out we give away deep ultraviolet lithography machines (that cost semiconductor equipment maker ASML $20 billion to develop) to the United States, we are worse off."
Due to the very nature of semiconductor, or in general, the global technological, supply chain, it is not just the Dutch ending up "worse off."According to a study conducted this year by Boston Consulting Group, a total ban on semiconductor sales to China would lose U.S. firms 37 percent of their revenues. But Washington's ever-escalating techno-nationalist policy is intended to suppress Chinese technological advances and would bear the growing cost to that end.
Over at least four years now, former President Donald Trump administration's initially low-grade and scattershot regulatory restrictions have intensified into Joe Biden's broad-based economic and technological decoupling campaign, with no stopping point. And given the dangerous bipartisan consensus on China in Washington's power corridors, it stands unlikely the U.S. would retreat from this perilous policy path.
Washington's maximalist coercive campaign against China; and unilateral muscle-flexing toward stooping its allies and others to its fatal choice, is spelling dire, long-run consequences for individual stakeholders to the wider tech ecosystem and international trade governance.
Consequently, South Korea along with Japan and China's Taiwan region, the United States has envisioned establishing a fragmenting semiconductor alliance in accordance with its self-interest-driven industrial policy lines while requiring them to break contractual agreements with their biggest semiconductor trading partner, China. According to the South Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry, South Korea's semiconductor exports to China grew nearly 13-fold between 2000 and 2021. In 2020, the Chinese mainland received 43.2 percent of all South Korean semiconductor exports, and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region received another 18.3 percent, totaling 61.52 percent of all shipments, according to a KIEP analysis published earlier this year.
Therefore, South Korea would have to comply if the U.S. strong-armed the country into compliance against its solid reluctance. The U.S., meanwhile, has granted South Korean semiconductor firms a one-year exemption from its newly adopted export control restrictions against China. But the short-term concession to South Korea is not because America is compassionate to its concern over its economic losses. Rather, given that Korea's strength in the semiconductor industry lies in manufacturing other than in semiconductor materials, parts, or equipment, the U.S., as expert points, is well aware that South Korea's taking part in U.S. semiconductor technology export restriction against China will have little to no effect. Maybe, it is not far off the United States would coerce South Korea into its decoupling fatalism at its sheer economic detriments as Washington's one-way anti-China policies have gotten blunter.
Moreover, the ripple effects, in the U.S., China, and all other semiconductor stakeholders, could be the tip of the iceberg. As experts fear, the catastrophic consequences of export restrictions limiting China's access to American technology across the tech ecosystem will be witnessed over several decades. Both investments and innovation in the tech sector – which are contingent on"meticulously arranged supply chains and manufacturing processes"– will be hit hard as both countries and private tech firms have increasingly been wary of U.S. ever-growingly opaque, unpredictable and riskier China-proofing tech coercion.
Given the looming catastrophe that the U.S.'s decoupling policy process entails, it is imperative for countries to pursue more independent tech policies, if not one to make one's tech supply chain fully U.S.-proof. How? The Dutch have shown us already.
Hafijur Rahman is a columnist and Security and Strategic analyst, working in a prominent Strategic Studies Center in Bangladesh.
