In the autumn of 2022, the United States announced the most sweeping export controls on advanced semiconductors since the Cold War, barring China from buying the chips and the chip-making equipment that power everything from artificial intelligence to modern weapons systems. The assumption behind the policy was straightforward: deny the technology long enough, and China's ambitions would stall. What has happened since then is considerably more complicated. Beijing did not retreat.

Instead, the restrictions appear to have acted less like a ceiling and more like a challenge. Chinese state investment in domestic semiconductor research accelerated sharply after each new round of American controls, and companies such as Huawei have released products that industry analysts once believed China would not be capable of producing for years. The pattern is not new — the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear programme after being excluded from American atomic research — but the speed at which China is closing certain gaps has surprised even seasoned observers in Washington and Brussels alike. The consequences extend well beyond the two countries at the centre of the dispute.

Nations across Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa now face pressure from both sides to choose which technological ecosystem they will rely on — American or Chinese — for their critical infrastructure. That choice, once merely commercial, is increasingly political, shaping everything from the design of national broadband networks to the standards that will govern next-generation mobile communications.