re: China is running the same strategy now with fertilizer that they have used to dominate

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Yeah fertilizer is the same as high tech spyware being installed in govt installations across the country

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The issue with Huawei went far beyond the debate over whether the company
helped tap phones or pilfer data. Huawei executives’ admission
that they’d violated U.S. sanctions on Iran angered many in
Washington but was ultimately a sideshow. The real issue was that
a company in the People’s Republic of China had marched up the
technology ladder—from, in the late 1980s, simple phone
switches to, by the late 2010s, the most advanced telecom and
networking gear. Its annual R&D spending now rivaled American
tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Intel. Of all China’s tech
rms, it was the most successful exporter, giving it detailed
knowledge of foreign markets. It not only produced hardware for
cell towers, it also designed cutting-edge smartphone chips. It had
become TSMC’s second biggest customer, behind only Apple. The
pressing question was: Could the United States let a Chinese
company like this succeed?

“The United States needs to
strangle Huawei,” Republican senator Ben Sasse declared in 2020.
“Modern wars are fought with semiconductors and we were letting
Huawei use our American designs.”

Hobbling Huawei’s rise became a fixation of
the administration. When the Trump administration first decided to
turn up its pressure on Huawei, it prohibited the sale of U.S.-made chips to
the company. This restriction alone was devastating, given that
Intel chips are ubiquitous and many other U.S. companies
manufacture all-but-irreplaceable analog chips. Yet after decades
of offshoring, far less of the semiconductor production process
took place in the United States than previously. For example,
Huawei produced the chips that it designed not in the U.S.—
which lacked facilities capable of building advanced smartphone
processors—but at Taiwan’s TSMC. Restricting the export of U.S.-
made goods to Huawei would do nothing to stop TSMC from
fabricating advanced chips for Huawei.

The Trump administration, by
contrast, concluded it had unique power to weaponize
semiconductor supply chains.

In May 2020, the administration tightened restrictions on
Huawei further. Now, the Commerce Department declared, it
would “protect U.S. national security by restricting Huawei’s
ability to use U.S. technology and software to design and
manufacture its semiconductors abroad.” The new Commerce
Department rules didn’t simply stop the sale of U.S.-produced
goods to Huawei. They restricted any goods made with U.S.-
produced technology from being sold to Huawei, too. In a chip
industry full of choke points, this meant almost any chip.

The assault on Huawei was followed by blacklisting multiple
other Chinese tech firms.

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try harder, you are better than this.

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