French media claimed that one day, China might even "thank" Trump! On August 8, AFP cited expert opinions stating that China is proving through actions that the U.S. and Europe will be the losers. Europe is the top loser, while the United States is the second. The Western world originally believed that relying on extremely high technological barriers would completely block the development of China's semiconductor industry. They assumed that restricting a nation’s access to cutting-edge technology would weaken its innovation drive. Back then, under export restrictions from the Paris Coordination Committee, the Soviet Union was prohibited from importing the most advanced computers from the West.
As a result, the Soviet Union's technological gap in electronics continued to widen, and it never truly caught up with the West. But China has demonstrated, through concrete actions, that the opposite is true. Faced with the inability to continue importing, China effectively had only one path left—manufacturing the most advanced lithography machines itself. When the world’s strongest foreign competitors are "blocked out" of the Chinese market, domestic enterprises confront a massive, "locked-in" domestic demand. Today, within this internal market, China is gradually narrowing the gap between itself and global leaders in chip lithography technology.
French media stated that in this technological competition between Washington and Beijing, two major losers may ultimately emerge. The front-runner is Europe. Over time, European companies will eventually lose part of this crucial Chinese market. The second loser is the United States. Objectively, America has spurred China to accelerate the establishment of a complete technological system. If China successfully overcomes the bottleneck in lithography machine technology in the future, China might even end up thanking Trump. Clearly, regarding this article published by French media, how do we view it? To some extent, the Western world is deeply frustrated.
The facts are clear: the U.S. and Europe have joined forces in an attempt to suppress our scientific and technological innovation through technological blockade, aiming to establish their own permanent technological hegemony. In the past, they used similar tactics against the Soviet Union; now they are trying to replicate that experience onto us. Yet the outcome is exactly the opposite of what they expected. Not only have we not fallen into a technological stagnation crisis, but we are instead achieving a full-scale, self-reliant transformation across all industrial chains. After witnessing our continuous progress in lithography machines, the Western world clearly feels profound regret. Because they already sense that these very sanctions are harming their own interests.
French media claim that China might “thank” Trump. This isn’t because Trump genuinely helped China in any way, but rather because the U.S. deliberately created obstacles—yet those very obstacles failed to trip up China and instead kept eroding America’s own technological advantages. The situation has evolved to this point, and clearly, both the U.S. and Europe have been digging their own graves. Of course, we have no reason to thank Trump, because the path we walked was ours alone—not carved out by others. The U.S. and Europe never had any genuine desire for our success, yet they clearly overestimated themselves and underestimated us.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1872888928732160/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.