From
George Castro
International analyst
The global semiconductor (“chip”) market is projected to decline by 4.1% in 2023, reaching a level of US$557 billion; and in it, the segment called “memory” (memory), crucial for the energy generated by “chips”, has collapsed by more than 17% compared to 2022, representing a value of 112,000 million dollars.
It should be added that the essential strategic fact of the semiconductor market is that 45% of global demand corresponds to the People’s Republicwhere the hegemony is in terms of consumption and investment.
The virtual collapse experienced by the “memory” category is the direct consequence of the practically absolute ban that the United States has implemented on the sale of any of its products belonging to this segment to companies in the People’s Republicas part of a thoughtful “national security” strategy by the government of President Joe Biden and the US Congress, which includes its two houses and all its parties, both Democrats and Republicans.
The goal of this “national security strategy” it is to halt – and at least prevent – the formidable expansion of the Chinese high-tech industry over the last 10 years, especially in the decisive sector of technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (CRI), where the American (and also Chinese) consensus has the absolute certainty that the nucleus of world power resides in the 21st century.
THE Chinese high-tech question, led by the semiconductor or “chip” market, is consistently growing 15% annually or more; and this pace, which is what it has acquired in the last decade, tends to accelerate considerably.
In this activity all scientific and technological advances are manifested through continuous innovations; and in the speed that this process has acquired, China tends unequivocally to surpass the rest of the world, including the United States.
WIPO (“World Intellectual Property Organization”) publishes the Global Innovation Index (IGI) every year; and shows the characteristic speed of the advance of the People’s Republic, which was ranked 34th in 2013 and has now risen to 11th in 2022. This pace means that China would occupy one of the top three places in the world in terms of scientific and technological innovation by the end of 2024.
As WIPO itself points out, scientific and technological innovation is essentially a collaborative activity with a global reach.
The international organization points out that half of the most advanced scientific and technological research in the United States is carried out by researchers of foreign origin, or residents outside the American territory; and the percentage in China is even higher than in the United States.
Over the past 10 years, when President Xi Jinping and the “Fifth Generation” assumed political power in the People’s Republic, China has become the second country in the world for spending on scientific and technological research and development (R&D), with an investment of 2.8% of the product, which represents 450,000 million dollars in 2022.
Already 6 million world-class scientific and technological researchers, established by their scientifically proven contributions, make up the advanced organic intelligence of the world’s second superpower.
The premise on which the Chinese government starts is this capitalism can only be overcome starting from itself; and now, in the CRI and in the global society created by the technical revolution, this overcoming occurs when capital is supplanted by a “Collective Intelligence”, just as Karl Marx himself predicted in the “Grundrisse” of 1857. .
The Chinese calculation is that in this crucial aspect – the transition from capital to “Collective Intelligence” – it is 10 years behind the US; but for a country with a history of 5,000 years, 10 years is nothing.
The innovation system of the People’s Republic, precisely because it is one of the two most advanced in the world, is a mechanism that is deeply open and largely integrated into the global system, whose studies are necessarily public and cooperative; and in which the fundamental impulse comes from private companies, in particular from large digital platforms with a global reach (Alibaba/Baidú/Tencent, among others).
In short, the Chinese regime has at its disposal for its race for the core of world power in the 21st century a system of innovation that is largely open and integrated into the global system. There is no paradox here. Just a finite understanding the capitalism of the 21st century does not have a state sign but a private one and open to the international system.
In any case, the paradox of the Chinese system, which emerged from the strategic thinking of Mao Tse Tung and Xi Jinping, is the certainty that the only way to beat the USA (without this meaning defeating them) is use their own and most advanced technological and conceptual weapons of US capitalism with even greater efficiency and greater creativitythe first by definition of the global system.
Source: Clarin
