In 2018, Trump officially launched a trade war against China, and then immediately launched a technology war against China, with a very tight pace, like a premeditated step-by-step technology siege. Originally, the outside world thought that the United States' attitude towards China would be softened after Biden took office, but he didn't expect Biden to be more ruthless, not only putting 36 Chinese semiconductor companies on the "blacklist", but also encouraging TSMC to move to the United States.
Is there a way out for China in the face of U.S. aggressiveness on decoupling and the U.S. collusion with allies to impose technological isolation on China?
Let's briefly analyze the objective situation of China and the United States, the United States, as the place where the first integrated circuit was born, has a natural advantage in the development of chips. According to the 2021 Global Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), U.S. semiconductor companies accounted for 46.3% of the global semiconductor market. But that's just supply, we also need to look at demand.
In 2021, global semiconductor sales reached a record high of US$555.9 billion, of which the sales in the Chinese market were US$192.5 billion, an increase of 27.1% year-on-year.
And as far as semiconductor products are concerned, the United States dominates the upstream supply chain, while China dominates the downstream demand chain, and China and the United States are actually an interdependent and mutually balanced relationship. Nowadays, the downstream industry in the United States, including semiconductor manufacturing, is declining, while China's downstream industry is developing rapidly, but the upstream industry is still a weak link, which has led to the cold winter in the semiconductor industry for many years.
China is the world's largest chip market, and in the past five years, the United States has been cautious about suppressing Chinese technology companies, although during this period of time U.S. Secretary of Commerce Raimondo always said that it is worth sacrificing the profits of American companies when necessary, but in fact, they still dare not press too hard, because they know that once China is completely blocked, it will also hit their own companies hard.
Not only that, although the United States has now set a strict dividing line for Nvidia and other companies, it is still high-end chips, because they can't get stuck in the middle and low-end, and the mainland is developing very well in this regard, and the United States is not needed to provide chips at all.
On the contrary, we can use the low-end chip card American companies, because our demand for low-end chips is great, if the United States takes into account the low-end chip market, it must in turn protect the low-end market in China.
Therefore, the United States is afraid of China, and the mainland can take advantage of this opportunity to gradually penetrate into the upstream supply chain and midstream of chips. In fact, the mainland has long been in the layout, from Huawei's Kirin 9000S to SMIC's full help, these are not a few years can not be taken, and now the mainland has enterprises in the upstream, middle and downstream.
According to Lu Feng, a professor at the Department of Political Economy at the School of Government of Peking University, this requires China to do one thing ruthlessly: concentrate resources as soon as possible to promote the formation of China's integrated circuit localization industry chain, and make good use of China's large-scale advantages to build a base made entirely by China itself, and kick out the American production chain.
The first step is to de-Americanize the production line. At present, Chinese companies are already implementing a non-Americanization strategy, that is, no longer using American equipment in production lines, and instead using non-American equipment and materials made in China, Japan, South Korea, Europe, etc.
The second step is to comprehensively replace foreign equipment and materials, focusing on domestic equipment and materials, strengthening the status of domestic equipment and materials, and strengthening the interaction between manufacturing and design enterprises. Whether it is completely localized needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis, and the principle is that there can be no risk of being suppressed from the outside.
Achieving fully autonomous manufacturing relies on the cooperation of companies in all parts of China's industrial chain, because the technology of each link is interrelated with the others. Grasping the manufacturing link means grasping the key to the entire industrial chain. Although we are still not a world leader in fully autonomous manufacturing, we can start with fully autonomous manufacturing at 28nm and gradually move towards a more advanced stage.