-Analysis-
PARIS — Last Friday, the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, the country’s top decision-making body, held a session focused on “self-sufficiency” and the “promotion of healthy and orderly development of artificial intelligence.”
According to state media, Chinese President Xi Jinping used the Politburo meeting to emphasize the construction of a system that is “independent and controllable.”
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The key terms in this highly coded Party communication are “self-sufficiency,” “independence,” and “control.” At a time when Donald Trump has launched a commercial and technological war against China, Beijing is accelerating its technology decoupling — a process it began several years ago, but which the U.S. president’s actions have intensified.
Here lies the great paradox: Trump had hoped to slow China’s rise, particularly through technological sanctions such as banning the export of Nvidia chips vital for AI development. Instead, he may have inadvertently given China a boost.
In the end, Washington may have only bought itself some time — and likely no longer has the means to halt China’s unstoppable rise in next-generation technologies.
Vast resources
China is pouring vast resources — tens of billions of dollars — into reducing its dependencies. While Western countries have talked for years about “de-risking” their ties with China, Beijing has been doing the same in reverse. Trump’s policies have only reinforced this dynamic.
Take semiconductors, for example — the battleground of 21st-century technological power. The U.S. has gradually cut off China’s access to the most advanced chips, which it still cannot produce itself.
The bitter irony is that these chips are manufactured in Taiwan, the island Beijing claims as its own — yet they can no longer be exported to the mainland.
Huawei’s comeback story
Still, China is catching up. Huawei, the telecom giant, has become a national leader in semiconductor innovation. The company recently unveiled a system called CloudMatrix 384, which harnesses the power of 384 chips to match the performance of Nvidia’s high-end processors. Experts were as stunned by this achievement as they were in December when the Chinese company DeepSeek introduced a low-cost version of ChatGPT.
Huawei offers a striking case of technological decoupling. During his first term, Donald Trump targeted the company, pressuring U.S. allies to bar it from their markets. Many predicted Huawei’s demise once it was cut off from global supply chains and customers.
The tech world is splitting in a new Cold War between the West and China.
But the company made a remarkable comeback, in part by developing its own operating system. Where there were once two dominant mobile platforms — Apple’s iOS and Android — there is now a third: a Chinese system gaining ground in the non-Western world.
This model is becoming the new norm: the tech world is splitting in a new Cold War between the West and China, with the developing world acting as the final arbiter. That’s not what Donald Trump intended — but when you underestimate your adversary, you risk losing. And that is the danger now facing the U.S. president.
