As Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was visiting China earlier this week, a sea-green Chinese smartphone was quietly launched online.
It was no normal gadget. And its launch has sparked hushed concern in Washington that U.S. sanctions have failed to prevent China from making a key technological advance. Such a development would seem to fulfill warnings from U.S. chipmakers that sanctions wouldn’t stop China, but would spur it to redouble efforts to build alternatives to U.S. technology.
Competition is always good for the consumers. Having two authoritarian country competing means you can at least diversify where your data goes. Both will be trying to be at the top of the pyramid and products will get cheaper.
People will figure out a way to use them without the backdoors. Like how people currently buy cheap chinese phones and install LineageOS, or how people de-google with e/os/ or Graphene OS. Hardware backdoors will be a problem as they always have been but even they can be reverse engineered and patched.
If West or China is hostile to your country and threat model, use tech from the other side, and vice versa.
The west and especially US likes to sanction countries that don’t bend over for them and everyone joins in because they are afraid of the same retaliation. Every country is realizing that it’s not in their best interest to be a lapdog for a single super power. This opens up opportunities for bargains and not be on chokehold as it is now.
It’ll be worrying if a single entity becomes the sole global leader in tech.