America still leads in technology, but China is catching up fast

A RARE THING happened in an industrial park near Washington, DC, last November. Construction began on a $3bn extension to a semiconductor foundry owned by Micron Technologies, a maker of advanced memory chips, based in Idaho. “A few years ago, opening that sort of extension would have people saying, well, that is going to be moving to China soon, isn’t it?”, observes James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese cyber-policy and espionage.

Not now. Instead, that Micron foundry is a glimpse of the future. Trust in China has collapsed among American government and business bosses, and a consensus has grown that Chinese firms have closed the technological gap with Western rivals with indecent speed and by illicit means.

Today’s tensions make the original cold war look simple. In 2018 China accounted for 57% of Micron’s net sales. In the 1960s and 1970s American tech companies did not rely on Soviet customers. But Micron is a symbol, several times over, of how commercial competition is turning into a zero-sum contest, in which one side wins at the other’s expense. In 2015 Micron rebuffed a $23bn takeover bid from a Chinese state-backed investment fund, saying that it thought such a deal would be blocked on national-security grounds by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). In 2018 the Department of Justice...

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