Directives like this from Beijing indicate how challenging it is for central governments - even one as notoriously dominant as the CPC - to fully control the behaviour of private sector companies. Embedded imperatives of those institutions - state vs corp - are not fully aligned, especially in a globalised marketplace.

As the US vs China competition unfolds at state level, the State vs Corp conflict within both countries will an important below-the-surface theme.

> Directives like this from Beijing indicate how challenging it is for central governments... even the CPC, to fully control the behaviour of private sector companies.

They can fully control them, alright, but they aren't stupid - full control of behavior doesn't mean full control of results.

> As the US vs China competition unfolds at state level, the State vs Corp conflict within both countries will [be] an important below-the-surface theme.

In the US, there's no conflict and hasn't been for a while. The corp counter-revolution in China fizzled a few years ago, thus the conflict there was extinguished too. That explains a lot, including the sanctions that force China to build local chip capacity.

There's little below the surface, hidden in plain sight - yes.

The directive here is to get off CUDA in a sense, right? It's actually not a bad national imperative for any company.