The United States has increased restrictions on high tech chip related items being exported to China, according to Wikipedia. In 2022 it issued new Department of Commerce regulations restricting the types of chips that can be sold to China as well as manufacturing equipment for making such chips.  It also prohibits Americans from working on such chips for the PRC.    

Some of the most important components in making such chips are photolithography machines made in the Netherlands by the ASML company.  The Netherlands has agreed to cooperate with the US in restricting such exports.  ASML had been selling deep ultraviolet lithography systems to China, but Holland will now require companies to get licenses to do so.  The Netherlands has already banned the sale of extreme ultraviolet lithography system to China according to the Verge

The chip controls are reminiscent of export controls enforced against the old Soviet Union by Western countries under the Coordinating Committee, known as COCOM.  It was founded about five years after World War II came to an end, had 17 member states, and was disbanded in 1994.  It covered many more items than the current regulations controlling export of chips to China, and had a much more bureaucratic governing structure than the current chip controls. But it to some extent illustrates the similarity between US Cold War attitudes toward the old Soviet Union then and toward China now. 

The Henry L. Stimson Center produced a long paper chronicling the origins of COCOM, and its lesson for other export control regimes, including the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which I worked on creating and then expanding for several years while I was working at the Department of State.  The MTCR originated under the Carter administration, which wanted it to control missile proliferation like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) controls nuclear proliferation.  However, there was so much resistance to another non-proliferation treaty that it became an export control regime, more like the Zangger Committee (the NPT Exporters Committee) which harmonizes export controls for NPT parties. 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *