A May 2023 CSIS analysis by Gregory C. Allen documents that China's strategic response to U.S. semiconductor export controls began after the April 2018 ZTE sanctions, not after the October 2022 Biden-era controls targeting AI chips. The report, based on dozens of interviews with industry and government officials, shows that by October 2022, China had already been pursuing what one U.S. official characterized as "an eleven" on a scale of one to ten in efforts to eliminate U.S. technology from its supply chain. China's shift involved: (1) commissioning formal research on semiconductor "chokepoints" in July 2018, (2) reorienting massive subsidies toward domestic substitution rather than catching up to global performance, and (3) prioritizing self-reliance as a national security imperative. For financial institutions, this means Chinese semiconductor investment flows should be modeled as structurally driven by security logic rather than ROI logic, and China's semiconductor catch-up trajectory is less predictable than standard technology-diffusion models would suggest.
285 other tracked developments touching the same claims.