Everything can be reverse engineered without any transfer or hacking. Anyone with the resources available can take a die and remove layer by layer to reverse engineer any design. All major players are dong this type of reverse engineering. Determining what everyone else is doing is just the first step. The difficulty is developing the actual fab processes required in practice and at high yield.

Our biggest mistake in the US is over valuing IP to a ridiculous extreme. The value is in the physical process and application. We value potential exploitation instead of innovation at every level. We relegate innovation to a small elite group in a lab. This is stupid. While a few brilliant people are an asset, the few can not compete with the many. By outsourcing everything and failing to value an integrated workforce there is no chance of the USA remaining relevant against a country that has an integrated workforce and is over three times larger in population.

Even more so, most leading universities in the USA have largely abandoned domestic recruiting by exorbitant costs and turned to foreign recruitment for a larger pool of the super rich. Most of these foreign students are Asian and have been for decades. These people eventually go home to places where growth is integrated and workers are valued. The USA is a terrible place to live if you are not already a billionaire. The cost of living is ridiculous, the food quality is garbage, the infrastructure is crumbling, and the quality of life is terrible for the majority of people you encounter. Getting paid a little less to move to a place that is growing and investing in its entire population is a no brainer.

Open Source always wins. The writing is on the wall for all proprietary hardware. It is already obsolete. The real value is in everything that was outsourced and those things can't be brought back. The USA is fading into obsolescence because it over values exploitation instead of innovation and the super rich over the average citizens.

Good article, but it doesn't support your thesis that the sanctions are about China hacking at all. The idea they've managed to achieve this through hacking to steal technology is completely non-existent in the article.

The article suggests they just openly bought materials to produce this stuff lol.

Though it would be cool if they did "steal" it, IP is bullshit and particularly when used to forward unequal trade relationships internationally, depressing wages and creating US-centric systems of control. Using common ideas to create cool new stuff and circumvent US sanctions would be a good thing.

In case the things I'm saying seem alien, international IP rules were set up to favor colonizer nations at the expense of colonized nations, as there is an advantage to maintaining monopoly control over technology when the relationship you want with other countries is purely to extract their labor and natural resources. It is a means by which to prevent the redevelopment of countries ripped apart by colonial activity, as this would threaten domestic profits.

It is also a race against the other impact of protectionist policies, however: preventing that tech export to China is actually going to subsidize China creating its own tech, as they'll only be able to attain it through domestic production. This is how imperialist powers developed their own industries: the British Empire, for example, forced India to destroy its own fine textiles industry, export cotton, and import British-made textiles. Export and running of textile tech to India was explicitly banned alongside flooding the market with British factory-made textiles.

The US is using the only weapons it knows how to use - ones intended to limit others' ability to develop - but they will often backfire because China is not in as weak of a position as the countries the US usually bullies and/or tries to destroy.