I trust Western journalists as much as I trust a full grown hungry Nile crocodile with a human baby,
but this is disgusting IF real.
This also highlight the biggest issue that the Chinese government had with China commercial fabs like SMIC, HLMC and HHGrace.
even if those fabs were successful, there where so dependent on foreign input that in any geopolitical crisis the Chinese government knew they will be useless and there is another problem, foreign companies and workers there were constantly monitoring these fabs and foreign machines have telemetry services to monitor their performance. So there was a pretty serious case for espionage.
The Chinese government knew this since the mid 2000s, especially the export control part. Different from Russia, China consume semiconductors at such high volume that would be impossible to smuggle such amount of chips just to keep the basics working.
Again, my guess is that they devised a plan in `2012 to have a vast network of a purely domestic semiconductor-electronic supply chain and a network of fabs all across China by ~2030 to serve SOEs, domestic infrastructure, the space program and the military purely with domestic chips. Raging from discrete devices to 32nm ICs. First, this fabs would be immune to spying and second, even if there is a geopolitical crisis, even if SMIC, HMLC and others are shutdown, China will still have the ability produce chips and use this supply chain as blueprint to expand the domestic semiconductor from the ground up.
Jason Huang is right, the Chinese government doesn't want their institutions and much much less the Chinese military to be dependant of US made chips, not even Chinese Chips made in SMIC with US machines because the risk of supply chain disruptions. Different from what stooges said, I do think that China always wanted to separate SMIC and others from the PLA.
