As Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was visiting China earlier this week, a sea-green Chinese smartphone was quietly launched online.
It was no normal gadget. And its launch has sparked hushed concern in Washington that U.S. sanctions have failed to prevent China from making a key technological advance. Such a development would seem to fulfill warnings from U.S. chipmakers that sanctions wouldn’t stop China, but would spur it to redouble efforts to build alternatives to U.S. technology.
Competition is always good for the consumers. Having two authoritarian country competing means you can at least diversify where your data goes. Both will be trying to be at the top of the pyramid and products will get cheaper.
People will figure out a way to use them without the backdoors. Like how people currently buy cheap chinese phones and install LineageOS, or how people de-google with e/os/ or Graphene OS. Hardware backdoors will be a problem as they have always been.
If West or China is hostile to your country and threat model? Use tech from the other side, and vice versa.
It’ll be worrying if a single entity becomes the sole global leader in tech.