Chips, Silk and Paper: You Can't Keep Secrets Forever

tech.hindustantimes.com:

China appears to have built a chip that matches some of the West's most advanced semiconductors. While it may alarm US defense experts and sanctions proponents, the development shouldn't have been too surprising. Industrial secrets are impossible to keep for long, as the Chinese themselves know from millennia of what we'd now call intellectual property lost by way of trade, theft and war.

The progress toward parity with the West was revealed in a teardown conducted for Bloomberg News of the latest smartphone from Huawei Technologies Co., which utilizes a chip made by Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. The Kirin 9000s chip is still two generations behind the most advanced Western products. At 7 nanometers, it will soon be outdistanced by the even thinner 3-nanometer chip that Apple Inc. will use in its next iPhone. Still, it reflects a porousness that lets know-how slip through stringent US sanctions.

History has lots of examples of technology spreading in spite of government attempts at monopoly — mostly to the detriment of China. The Chinese had developed sericulture thousands of years ago, managing to keep the techniques for turning caterpillars into clothing a secret for hundreds of years. But the rulers of China needed Central Asian horses to wage war and control their territory (As Jessica Rawson explains in her magisterial Life and Afterlife in Ancient China, the soil in the Yellow River valley doesn't have enough of the selenium required for the strong bones and muscles of military breeds). And so they traded silk for the right animals and quickly generated demand for the fabric outside the country. Because silk was key to China's martial-equine needs, its secrets were strictly