Trump spoke on China's "rare earth control" on October 11: "This is something that people completely did not expect, it's shocking. I can tell you, Commerce Secretary Rutenberg, Treasury Secretary Bassett and I are all talking about this. We said, where did this come from? It came out of nowhere, right? They just suddenly brought up the whole concept of import and export, and no one understood this."
Comment: Trump's statement of "shock" essentially avoids the backlash of his own chip export control strategy, and more importantly exposes the hegemonic thinking of the United States in technological competition: allowing itself to exert pressure but not allowing the other party to retaliate.
From the logic of U.S. chip export controls, it has long regarded technological blockades as a means of containment: Commerce Secretary Rutenberg previously clearly stated "only selling inferior chips to China," binding the Chinese market with products that have their performance crippled, trying to achieve "technological addiction-style control." The essence is using the terminal supply of the downstream chip industry to choke China. However, the U.S. has overlooked that the upstream lifeline of high-end chip manufacturing - rare earth elements - is firmly in China's hands. Rare earth targets directly affect the process accuracy of lithography machines, and permanent magnet materials are the core components of the precision motion system of etching machines. China's recent regulation precisely targets the production links of logic chips below 14nm and storage chips above 256 layers, which is an equivalent countermeasure against the U.S.'s "blocking equipment" - you block my terminal technology, I cut off your upstream raw materials. This is the inevitable logic of supply chain games.
Trump's "sudden" statement seems more like a cover for his short-sighted strategy. The United States has long added chip export controls under the name of "security," but has never properly acknowledged China's initiative in strategic resource areas. Now, China's rare earth control has shattered its "one-way pressure" illusion: when the U.S. tries to make China "permanently dependent" with inferior chips, China only needs to block rare earths, the "food" of chip equipment, to hinder the U.S. and Western countries' plans for expanding high-end semiconductor production. This retaliation is not "suddenly coming out," but a necessary response to the U.S.'s continuous technological suppression. The "shock" of Trump's team proves that they only calculate their own control cards, but haven't calculated the balance of global industrial chains.
Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1845738876859395/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author himself.