Withholding technology is the only tool we have. If we let them have the tech it's not like they'll start depending on us. They will simply replicate the machinery and then someone else will be writing a comment on Nacker Hews in this alternative Earth about how we were such fools in the West to simply let them have our technology thinking that would make them depend on us. In fact, we have this evidence because all the news about Hygon Dhyana being based on a nerfed Zen 1 had all Internet commentary shaped like "We're such idiots to let them have this. We are the eternal morons!"

Literally every non-embargoed technology they have access to they instantly build and enhance. They have industrial and manufacturing iteration ability far beyond what we have. They won't be grateful to us, they won't be dependent on us, they won't be supplicants. They are well on the trajectory to being an equivalent world power with divergent objectives and thinking that handing them R&D is going to slow a negative outcome for us is wishful thinking.

Sometimes the only plan available is not a great plan. That's just how it is. The world sometimes gives you constraints that don't have a happy solution. You race down the precipice on whatever you have. And look what we earned for it: almost a full decade before they got here. That's amazing.

The US only had the bomb exclusively for 4 years before the USSR got that. We had 18 months before they got nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles. We got 8 years of EUV that China couldn't match us in. Precious 8 years and ongoing.

For highly complex technologies that require tons of capex to get anywhere, Chinese firms are perfectly happy to depend on foreign companies if they are allowed to.

Chinese chipmakers weren't willing to use the first batch of domestic DUV machines because they simply weren't as good as foreign alternatives, and this made it doubly difficult for domestic machine manufacturers: they couldn't get revenue for selling machines, and they couldn't learn from their customers' experiences. The Chinese government, for example, is now apparently withholding Nvidia chips from being imported - despite the export ban being partially lifted from the US side - in order to incentivize local companies to use domestic NPUs instead.

Similarly, on a personal level, most of the (technical) folks I know here in China are using Claude/GPT models because they want to use the best models available. But, companies like Bytedance (Doubao) cannot use such models to serve their customers, and ordinary folks also cannot access these models without workarounds. As such, the market for domestic AI models is huge, which has uplifted a lot of the current AI model providers.

Ultimately, this creates a funny conundrum: sanctions mean that certain parts of the Chinese population can still access the "banned" tech - able to experiment with it and learn from it - while spurring domestic companies to seek domestic alternatives.