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Consuming and sharing foreign media in North Korea can be punishable by death. But that did not stop more than 83% of those who escaped the country between 2016 and 2020 using increasingly sophisticated means to access foreign music, TV shows and films before they left.

According to a survey report that was released by the South Korean Ministry of Unification, illegal media consumption among those who left in the five years up to 2020 increased by 15% compared with the previous five-year period.

Since the mid-1990s, over 34,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea. However, North Korea closed its borders during the Covid pandemic, and since then the steady flow of escapees has slowed considerably.

The number of informants has dropped and the information they bring may be somewhat dated by the time they reach the South. But many tell a common story of huddling around a TV or laptop behind locked doors, consuming foreign media that was smuggled into North Korea on USB sticks and SD cards.

Escapees also tell how knowledge of the outside has changed North Korean consumer behavior, relationships and trust in the Kim family’s regime. This has prompted North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, to adopt increasingly harsh measures to combat access to illegal media.

Kim’s crackdown

Research that I conducted with my colleagues in 2019 while working for a human rights documentation NGO in South Korea found that public execution had been used by the North Korean state against people convicted of consuming or disseminating foreign media. The BBC reported one such case having recently taken place.

Forcing friends and neighbors to witness the punishment of those known to them for such a crime is a powerful deterrent deployed by a state that considers outside knowledge a profound threat to its ideology and the control of its people.

Shortly after inheriting the leadership in 2011, Kim tried a number of relatively soft approaches to controlling foreign media access, alongside continued punitive measures. They included a suite of information strategies aimed at making North Korea appear competitive and attractive in the eyes of its citizens, capable of producing its own “popular” content to rival the mighty force of the (South) “Korean Wave.”

More recently, the North Korean government has capitalized on its border closure to work harder than ever to keep foreign information out of the country. In 2020, it introduced a new “Law on the Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture.” This law sets out specific punishments for both viewers and distributors of foreign media, going further than the existing criminal code.

At the same time, Kim has publicly condemned K-Pop (pop music originating in South Korea) as a “vicious cancer” permeating North Korean society.

Changing hearts and minds

Testimonies published by organizations working with North Korean escapees show that consumption of South Korean television dramas has inspired young North Koreans to copy the fashion choices and catchphrases popularised by key characters.

North Korean escapees have also reported paying keen attention to the settings they saw in films and dramas. Modern streets, cars and homes, with people displaying relative freedom of choice, expression and movement, all offer North Koreans a glimpse into life under capitalism.

These depictions profoundly contradict the state’s narrative. North Korea presents the South as a depraved hellhole where people are ideologically corrupt and languishing in poverty.

A recent video from North Korea shown to me by the Korea Institute for National Unification shows that the new law on foreign media and culture is being accompanied by television campaigns.

These campaigns harshly name and shame citizens seen wearing clothing in foreign styles, particularly with English language writing or slogans – the language of the “American bastards.”

A similar campaign condemns young North Koreans for showing affection in public and mimicking “Western style” dating culture. Such behavior is criticized as corrupt and destructive to North Korean societal purity.

Building social bonds

Consuming foreign media does more than just cause North Koreans to question their government’s claim that they live in an “ideal” society, striving to attain a socialist utopia. It also unsettles the government’s ability to maintain a culture of suspicion and mistrust between citizens. This could potentially generate social change.

When asked about his experience watching foreign media with friends and family before his escape, one North Korean man said: “If you’ve watched it together, then no one would report it. They’d go down for it too.” For some North Koreans, consuming foreign media is an activity that builds closeness through shared indulgence in an illegal act.

Foreign diplomats, humanitarian aid workers and tourists are not yet allowed back into North Korea following the pandemic. So, combined with many fewer escapees arriving in the South, it is difficult to know whether foreign media access and consumption has declined since 2020.

But the Ministry of Unification has pledged to offer an update in a year’s time to evaluate the effect of the new law against foreign culture and the campaign around it.

Sarah A Son is Senior Lecturer in Korean Studies, University of Sheffield

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Dalibor Rohac, a scholar from the American Enterprise Institute writing in the London Spectator, says that Poland should have nuclear weapons.

Rohac claims “When it comes to Trump-proofing the security of Eastern Europe, few measures would be as effective as arming the largest country of the region – Poland – with nuclear weapons.”

A similar argument could be put forward for South Korea and Taiwan. Nuclear weapons for South Korea would match the nuclear missiles in the hands of North Korea. Taiwan, with nuclear weapons, could offset China’s nuclear threat to the island. 

Does any of this make sense?

In past years the United States has strongly opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons by other countries, with exceptions made for the UK and France. The UK “shares” its nuclear arsenal with the United States. France has its own nuclear deterrent, the Force de Frappe (sometimes called the Force de Dissuasion).  

Israel, a US ally but not a NATO member, does not admit it has nuclear weapons, but Israel allegedly has nuclear-armed Jericho missiles, nuclear gravity bombs and, more recently, submarine nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

From time to time the US has tried to cut off Israel from nuclear technology and force it to open up about its nuclear development facility in Dimona, in Israel’s Negev desert. Israel neither confirms nor denies it has nuclear weapons and, in the past, has said it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

The Dimona complex has recently been expanded.

The US reportedly halted the nuclear programs in South Korea and Taiwan. When the US announced it would reduce its presence in Korea and pull US troops out of the country in July 1970, South Korea sought to get plutonium from France to build atomic weapons. In 1975 the United States persuaded France not to deliver plutonium to South Korea and the US took other steps, including access to long range rocket technology, to force South Korea to halt its nuclear program.

Reviving discussion of a prospective nuclear-armed South now are several factors:

• North Korea’s nuclear weapons,
• Pyongyang’s proclamation that it was abandoning its policy seeking reunification of North and South Korea,
• the northern regime’s launch of short-, medium- and long-range missiles, seen as a deliberate provocation, and
•  comments by South Korea’s President.

There’s interest in the South in obtaining nuclear weapons, even though South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has walked back comments supporting renewed efforts for South Korea to get such weapons.

Taiwan is a more complicated matter.  In 1972 Richard Nixon ordered US nuclear weapons removed from Taiwan’s Tainan Air Base, where they had been stored.  This was a follow-up to the US rapprochement with China that started in July 1971 when Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to China. A year later, in 1972, Nixon himself would go to China.

In effect, the US removed its nuclear deterrent from Taiwan, and took other steps de-recognizing the island. The Nixon administration, had Congress not intervened, would have left Taiwan to its fate. This has left Taiwan second-guessing whether the United States would come to its aid in case of a Chinese invasion of the island.

Taiwan had long sought nuclear weapons and had a secret program going back at least to 1967, mainly carried out by the Taiwan Institute for Nuclear Energy and Research. In 1973 and 1974 Taiwan bought a significant amount of uranium from white-ruled South Africa, which had its own nuclear program.

Pressured by the United States, Taiwan agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, but the program secretly continued. In 1980 Taiwan ordered 4,000 tons of uranium metal from South Africa. Taiwan ended its effort to build nuclear weapons in 1987 because it could not produce a small enough weapon that was deliverable against China.

In effect the United States wanted to control nuclear weapons and not have its allies, other than France and the UK, have independent programs.

Nonetheless, Italy was fairly far advanced on its own, independent nuclear program (Italian scientists including Enrico Fermi contributed significantly to the Manhattan Project in the United States).

Similarly, West Germany was also working on its own program, although claims of coordination between France and Germany on nuclear weapons have been debunked.

The US was able to persuade these countries not to move forward unilaterally.  Not only did the US put its own nuclear weapons in both countries, including gravity bombs and missiles, but it put in place nuclear sharing agreements with Italy, Germany and others.  

Despite domestic opposition in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the US was able to place 108 Pershing-2 missiles in West Germany at Neu-Ulm, Mutlangen and Neckarsulm. These missiles were designed to counter Soviet SS-20 nuclear missiles, but they were dismantled after the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement with the USSR went into effect in 1988.

In October, 2018 President Donald Trump notified Russia the US was withdrawing from the INF Treaty because Russia wasn’t complying with INF missile restrictions.  With the US on its way out, Russia ended its own INF participation in 2019.

US nuclear cooperation has not been offered in Eastern Europe or to other new NATO members.  One of them, Sweden, had produced a nuclear bomb in 1965.  It was planning to produce four more.  But opposition to nuclear weapons grew in Sweden and, by 1967, Sweden ended its bomb program.

Ukraine is not yet a member of NATO although it is on track to become one eventually.  In 1992, after Ukraine became independent, it agreed to have Russia remove its nuclear weapons from Ukrainian territory.  

Russia in late 2023 deployed tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.  According to Belarus, these weapons were put there to “deter Poland.”  

Behind the Belarus deployment was Russia’s intention to match the alleged potential deployment of US nuclear weapons to Poland. Russia has said it believes that the US has nuclear weapons in Poland, or ones that could quickly be put there as part of the AEGIS Ashore air defense system.

The AEGIS vertical launch system supports air defense interceptor missiles, but it also can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles.  The US retired its Tomahawk nuclear warheads after the INF Treaty was signed, but the Russians apparently believe the Tomahawk could be turned into a nuclear delivery system easily.

This potential, in Russian eyes, probably justifies the Belarus deployment as a Russian countermeasure, although there may be other causes for Putin’s action.

There are calls in the United States to bring back the nuclear Tomahawk.

The Russians also think the US may move other nuclear delivery systems to Poland, including F-35 fighter jets that can drop nuclear gravity bombs. Russia is aware from western reports that NATO nuclear sharing will include the F-35.

Poland has already asked the United States to station its nuclear weapons on Polish territory but has been officially rebuffed. Polish security experts and former generals want Poland to get its own nuclear weapons, seeing too much risk otherwise.  

At the present time, the EU is spending billions on arming and supporting Ukraine and urging its member states to supply weapons including fighter aircraft, artillery systems, and other war fighting material. Poland has energetically backed the EU initiative, and acts as the major staging area for Ukraine-bound armaments.

Both the EU and NATO fear Ukraine could lose the war with Russia, or the war could spill-over to Poland. With increasingly empty conventional weapons’ arsenals in Europe and the United States, the nuclear option looks more attractive to many. Having a nuclear deterrent, in the view of some Poles, would give Russian leaders second thoughts about launching an attack on Poland and, consequently, on NATO.

There is fear among European elites over the looming election bid of Donald Trump, compounded by his negative statements on NATO – which he called “busted.” Will Europe be cast adrift without US protection? Will the US nuclear umbrella, the bedrock of European security, disappear? Should Europe be prepared for its own defense without the United States?

These are hard questions for Europeans and for the United States. If the US under either Biden or a future Trump presidency decides to stay the course in Europe, nuclear weapons deployment will have to be on the agenda.  Otherwise current-day European leaders may go down the nuclear road on their own.

Stephen Bryen served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. This article was first published on his Weapons and Strategy Substack and is republished with permission.

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In December, 2018 I wrote an article for Asia Times discussing Russia’s Avangard fractional orbiting nuclear weapon system.

Today’s revelation suggesting that Russia intends to deploy a space based nuclear weapon has elicited demands that the Biden administration tell the American people what the intelligence reports say – and that the information should all be declassified.

We now await a decision on this by Biden’s National Security Council.

Jake Sullivan, the President’s national security advisor, is preparing to brief members of Congress on the intelligence committees. At the same time it is reported that all members of Congress have been informed in messages. Exactly what the administration’s information is, and how big a threat we face, is not yet clear.

If, in fact, we are speaking of the Avangard, Russia’s hypersonic, fractional orbiting system, or anything similar, then it is a threat the United States should have taken seriously previously and should have put in place programs to counter it.

There also may be an espionage aspect to the story. The Russians have arrested a number of top scientists involved in hypersonic weapon research. At least one of them died after being apprehended. In addition, one or more of them are implicated in sharing missile technology with a US defense company.

Probably a lot more is involved, but we don’t have much information about what happened in Russia.

Meanwhile, the 2018 article in Asia Times may prove helpful. You can read it below.

One modification: the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty referred to was cancelled by the United States in 2018 and the Russians pulled out of the treaty in 2019.

by Stephen Bryen

ASIA TIMES, December 29, 2018

Russia, China and the United States, although the US is farther behind, are all working on hypersonic weapons – weapons that fly so fast that current technology has difficulty picking them up on radar and even bigger problems trying to defeat them.

Now President Vladimir Putin claims Russia is getting ready to deploy in 2019 an intercontinental ballistic missile that can fly up to 20 times the speed of sound, called Avangard.  The missile if it performs as advertised is a game changer because there is no missile defense system that can intercept a warhead flying to the target at hypersonic speeds.

How important is this?  Today the US has only a few deployed missile defense systems and none of them are at all capable of defeating a nuclear attack from Russia or China. The reason for that is two-fold:

Firstly US missile defenses are not yet reliable interceptors (even in tests where the incoming missiles are neither deploying decoys or maneuvering).

Secondly there are too few interceptors (in the form of THAAD, PAC-3, Ground-Based Interceptor or land or sea-based SM-3s) to deal with mass missile attacks.

Consequently the US has provided some missile and air defense systems to allies and friends (such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel), but mostly designed to deal with small scale attacks and focused on terminal air defenses (that is, killing the incoming missile while it is actually close to its target overhead).

One of the reasons why Israel developed its own Arrow 3 interceptor is to be able to kill enemy missiles in the exo-atmosphere – that is, capable of a missile kill outside the earth’s atmosphere, as an incoming missile hit overhead (in what’s called the endo-atmosphere) risks crashing into populated centers the way SCUD rockets did during the First Gulf war and as Houthi (Iran) rockets did in Riyadh, Taif and elsewhere.

US strategic doctrine has been torn between two opposing theories of what to do about missile threats.

In simplest terms the most pervasive operational theory has been “mutually assured destruction” or MAD. MAD posits that if an enemy attacks, the US will launch its own strategic missiles and bombs – some of them deep underground in hardened silos, others aboard strategic bombers and still others launched by missile-firing submarines (“boomers”).  Taken together, the US calls this the strategic triad.

The other approach is not to rely on MAD as a sufficient deterrent but to build missile defenses.

Mostly this has been justified as a means to deal with rogue states or errant missile launches against the United States or its allies. Even so, missile defenses are one of the sore spots in US defenses, because all the programs have been controversial and either under serious delays (problems in testing) or underfunded.

MAD proponents, and Russian propaganda have typically attacked US programs like the Ground Based Interceptor and THAAD as intending to give the US a “first strike” capability.

While making such claims Russia and China both have continued to pursue systems that offer “break out” from the constraints of MAD and to get out from under arms control agreements.

The latest Russian gambit to deploy Avangard directly undermines all strategic arms agreements because it is a first strike threat when measured against current technology that could defeat such missiles.

The heart of all arms control efforts is to aim to stabilize the nuclear arms balance and control or eliminate systems that fall outside of the ambit of the balance. Thus for example the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) had a major purpose of removing high risk, hard-to-intercept systems such as Russia’s SS-20 and the US Pershing II (both of which threatened Europe and European-Russia).

The Trump administration has served notice it wants to cancel the INF because of Russian “cheating,” but it is still too soon to be sure that will be the final outcome.

Meanwhile Avangard and surely others in the same class of hypersonic weapons are a direct challenge both to MAD doctrine and to missile defenses. They undermine in a fundamental manner all US-Russia arms control agreements. 

A dangerous consequence of all this is that Avangard will give Russian military commanders the idea they can strike first and “win” whatever conflict they may get into with the United States and NATO. Given that no one can be sure about Russia’s future stability, this is a huge threat and risk.

Avangard-like weapons are not so far away in Asia either. China is surely watching how the US will respond to Russia’s initiative on hypersonic weapons to see if Avangard-like weapons can be subjected to missile control agreements in future.  The still very bad relations between Russia and the United States suggest any solution is far off.  Meanwhile Avangard will wreak havoc on existing arms control measures and destabilize the nuclear-weapons arena.

Stephen Bryen served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. The new top on this article was first published on his Weapons and Strategy Substack and is republished with permission.

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Russia has used its new hypersonic 3M22 Zircon missile in Ukraine for the first time in nearly two years of the conflict, according to multiple news reports, marking a potential significant escalation of the war.  

Preliminary analysis by the Kiev Scientific Research Institute for Forensic Examinations (KNDISE) of missile fragments from a Russian attack on February 7 claims that a Zircon missile had been used.

The missile is claimed to have a range of 1,000 kilometers and travel at nine times the speed of sound. Its hypersonic speed could mean significantly reduced reaction time for air defenses and the capability to attack large, deep and hardened targets.

Russia has not commented on the weapon’s alleged use in Ukraine. If its use in war is more widely confirmed, the weapon could pose an additional challenge to the embattled country’s air defenses amid uncertainty over the sustainability of Western military aid.

The Zircon missile was first flight-tested in 2015 and declared operational by 2022. Russia tested the missile off two warships, the Admiral Gorshkov frigate and the Severodvinsk submarine, before using it to arm the frigate in January 2023.

However, neither of those warships is currently in the Black Sea and it would be unusual for the missile to be fired in live combat for the first time from a vessel from which it has never previously been tested.

The Zircon is part of a Russian family of “superweapons” unveiled in March 2018 that are designed to penetrate emerging US missile defense systems and thus increase Russia’s bargaining power in strategic arms negotiations with the US.

A September 2021 Chatham House report describes the Zircon as a ship-launched hypersonic anti-ship missile, most likely a dual-capable system designed to strike high-value targets on land and sea including carrier air groups.

The report says that the Zircon consists of two elements: a solid fuel booster for the first part of its flight from the point of launch to an exoatmospheric altitude where it follows a “skip-glide” trajectory to the target, after which a detachable warhead most likely with a scramjet engine to maintain terminal velocity destroys it.

Russia has previously used hypersonic missiles against Ukraine, including the air-launched 9-S-7760 Kinzhal against the latter’s US-supplied Patriot missile system.

In a February 2023 article for the Modern War Institute, Peter Mitchell mentions that the Patriot’s May 2023 intercept of a Kinzhal missile shows the weapon’s limitations.

Mitchell says that, unlike the Zircon, which employs a scramjet engine or other advanced propulsion system while maintaining hypersonic speed, the Kinzhal has a solid-fuel rocket engine most likely derived from the SS-26 Iskander ballistic missile, which cannot be shut down in flight.

Furthermore, he says that once the Kinzhal’s solid-fuel rocket engine burns out, it coasts to the target, casting doubts on whether it can maintain its advertised Mach 10 hypersonic speed.

He points out that the method of attack leaves the Kinzhal vulnerable to interception during its terminal stage, with its small control surfaces raising questions about its agility and maneuvering capabilities, which he likens to a giant lawn dart loaded with explosives.

As such, the Zircon represents a step up for Russia’s strategic bombing campaign against Ukraine, intending to destroy critical military and infrastructure while sapping the latter’s morale. However, ballistic and hypersonic missile strikes may be of doubtful military value in breaking the military stalemate in Ukraine. 

Sidharth Kaushal mentions in a January 2023 Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) that Ukraine has few civilian infrastructure targets that would justify the use of costly and scarce Zircon missiles.

Kaushal notes that Russia tends to use a mix of low-cost drones and cruise missiles against Ukraine, showing a desire to minimize the use of expensive and difficult-to-replace capabilities.

Still, Kaushal says hypersonic weapons such as the Zircon are the latest iteration of evolution and counter-evolution between missile-centric Russian forces and Western navies, with the former’s submarine-launched hypersonic weapons such as the Zircon underscoring the need for improved anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities by the latter.

However, US ASW capabilities have atrophied since the Cold War and have failed to keep pace with improvements in Russian and Chinese submarine capabilities.

In an April 2021 article for Proceedings, Walker Mills and other writers say that the US Navy’s P-3 Orion ASW aircraft, used during the Cold War, had dwindled to just 137 by 2010, with the last active-duty squadron retiring in 2019.

Mills and others mention that while the US Navy requires 138 P-8As, 128 are under contract as of early April 2021. Mills and others note that while the US Navy supplements the P-8As with MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), they are spread thinly, pointing out that the P-8A is a high-demand, low-density asset spread thin in its role of protecting US surface vessels.

They also mention that the US surface fleet is less capable in ASW than it should be, suffering from distraction and warfighting atrophy, as the US Navy decommissioned the last of its frigates over five years ago. Meanwhile, the littoral combat ships’ ASW mission modules have struggled to satisfy the platform’s restrictive weight requirements.

Mills and others mention that the Constellation-class frigates will not join the surface fleet until the mid-to-late 2020s and that while guided-missile destroyers (DDG) and cruisers (CG) have robust ASW capabilities, they are high-demand, low-density assets with multiple commitments beyond the Indo-Pacific.

They point out that the vast expanses of the Indo-Pacific demand far more than the 10 or 14 DDGs or CGs currently available to the US 7^th Fleet.

However, new technologies may compensate for the lack of high-end ASW platforms. While not entirely replacing them in quantity and substituting for physical presence, they can vastly improve existing capabilities while offering new capabilities.

In a February 2023 article for National Defense Magazine, Laura Heckmann mentions that artificial intelligence will allow sailors, airmen and marines to squeeze out more capability from existing systems and that AI can be helpful in real-time modeling and simulation supporting ASW mission planning by enabling the evaluation of the ocean environment.

Heckmann says that along with AI unmanned platforms could be used more aggressively in ASW operations. She points out the flawed approach of contemporary ASW operations as they do not scale well with procurement and sustainment costs running into the billions of dollars.

She writes that unmanned systems offer a cost-cutting solution and are easier to scale up, with their cost savings paying for the systems. Despite that, Heckmann cautions against a fully robotized approach to ASW, suggesting instead a blend of manned and unmanned systems.

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China’s national champions for computer chip – or semiconductor – design and manufacturing, HiSilicon and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), are making waves in Washington.

SMIC was long considered a laggard. Despite being the recipient of billions of dollars from the Chinese government since its founding in 2000, it remained far from the technological frontier. But that perception — and the self-assurance it gave the US — is changing.

In August 2023, Huawei launched its high-end Huawei Mate 60 smartphone. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (an American think tank based in Washington DC), the launch “surprised the US” as the chip powering it showed that Chinese self-sufficiency in HiSilicon’s semiconductor design and SMIC’s manufacturing capabilities were catching up at an alarming pace.

More recent news that Huawei and SMIC are scheming to mass-produce so-called 5-nanometre processor chips in new Shanghai production facilities has only stoked further fears about leaps in their next-generation prowess.

These chips remain a generation behind the current cutting-edge ones, but they show that China’s move to create more advanced chips is well on track, despite US export controls.

The US has long managed to maintain its clear position as the frontrunner in chip design and has ensured it was close allies who were supplying the manufacturing of cutting-edge chips. But now it faces formidable competition from China, whose technological advance carries profound economic, geopolitical and security implications.

For decades, chipmakers have sought to make ever more compact products. Smaller transistors result in lower energy consumption and faster processing speeds, so massively improve the performance of a microchip.

Moore’s Law — the expectation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years — has remained valid in chips designed in the Netherlands and the US, and manufactured in Korea and Taiwan. Chinese technology has therefore remained years behind. While the world’s frontier has moved to 3-nanometer chips, Huawei’s homemade chip is at 7 nanometers.

Maintaining this distance has been important for economic and security reasons. Semiconductors are the backbone of the modern economy. They are critical to telecommunications, defense and artificial intelligence.

The US push for “made in the USA” semiconductors has to do with this systemic importance. Chip shortages wreak havoc on global production since they power so many of the products that define contemporary life.

Today’s military prowess even directly relies on chips. In fact, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “all major US defense systems and platforms rely on semiconductors.”

The prospect of relying on Chinese-made chips — and the backdoors, Trojan horses and control over supply that would pose — are unacceptable to Washington and its allies.

Stifling China’s chip industry

Since the 1980s, the US has helped establish and maintain a distribution of chip manufacturing that is dominated by South Korea and Taiwan. But the US has recently sought to safeguard its technological supremacy and independence by bolstering its own manufacturing ability.

Through large-scale industrial policy, billions of dollars are being poured into US chip manufacturing facilities, including a multi-billion dollar plant in Arizona.

The second major tack is exclusion. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has subjected numerous investment and acquisition deals to review, ultimately even blocking some in the name of US national security. This includes the high-profile case of Broadcom’s attempt to buy Qualcomm in 2018 due to its China links.

In 2023, the US government issued an executive order inhibiting the export of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment and technologies to China. By imposing stringent export controls, the US aims to impede China’s access to critical components.

The hypothesis has been that HiSilicon and SMIC would continue to stumble as they attempt self-sufficiency at the frontier. The US government has called on its friends to adopt a unified stance around excluding chip exports to China. Notably, ASML, a leading Dutch designer, has halted shipments of its hi-tech chips to China on account of US policy.

Washington has also limited talent flows to the Chinese semiconductor industry. The regulations to limit the movements of talent are motivated by the observation that even “godfathers” of semiconductor manufacturing in Japan, Korea and Taiwan went on to work for Chinese chipmakers — taking their know-how and connections with them.

This, and the recurring headlines about the need for more semiconductor talent in the US, has fuelled the clampdown on the outflow of American talent.

Finally, the US government has explicitly targeted China’s national champion firms: Huawei and SMIC. It banned the sale and import of equipment from Huawei in 2019 and has imposed sanctions on SMIC since 2020.

What’s at stake?

The “chip war” is about economic and security dominance. Beijing’s ascent to the technological frontier would mean an economic boom for China and bust for the US. And it would have profound security implications.

Economically, China’s emergence as a major semiconductor player could disrupt existing supply chains, reshape the division of labour and distribution of human capital in the global electronics industry.

From a security perspective, China’s rise poses a heightened risk of vulnerabilities in Chinese-made chips being exploited to compromise critical infrastructure or conduct cyber espionage.

Chinese self-sufficiency in semiconductor design and manufacturing would also undermine Taiwan’s “silicon shield.” Taiwan’s status as the leading manufacturer of semiconductors has so far deterred China from using force to attack the island.

China is advancing its semiconductor capabilities. The economic, geopolitical and security implications will be profound and far-reaching. Given the stakes that both superpowers face, what we can be sure about is that Washington will not easily acquiesce, nor will Beijing give up.

Robyn Klingler-Vidra is Associate Dean of Global Engagement and Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship and Sustainability, King’s College London and Steven Hai is Affiliate Fellow, King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, King’s College London, King’s College London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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