The quickest way for the US/West to force its companies like Dell, Apple, IBM etc to exit the China and re-shore back in the US or say Vietnam, Mexico, India is to hit it at the chip/IC/semiconductor level... a broad categorical blanket and yet precise surgical strike.
Currently China does NOT have a fully indigenous 14nm much less 7nm, 5nm or 3nm etc...
But THAT isn't even the entire scope of the problem. If US did a blanket ban and told the likes of ARM/ Intel/TSMC to completely cut ties with all of China (and all Chinese entities, companies etc) then immediately overnight this means Dell, Apple, etc etc all have to pull its factories and supply chains out of China... even if China created a clone of the Intel x86 processor overnight the OEM cannot use it, its all structured to use Intel chipsets... its not that simple to plug in a new Chinese CPU etc etc... plus they would never get Microsoft to get on board to create drivers and kernels that support Chinese CPU! America "owns" most of the entire stack.
This is America's "nuclear option" in terms of striking China's tech ecosystem and supply chain... by making sure all chips (like Intel, AMD, Arm processors) are embargoed and forbidden to ship to China at all, in one fell swoop they can effectively force all integrators (yes even hanjian Lenovo) to move their entire supply chain out of China to rehome elsewhere...
Sure electronics worldwide would probably become an order of magnitude more expense for a while, but this would be the US option for digital "scorched earth" and its "rip and replace" on steroids that makes it 5G/Clean Network initiative look like childs play , its the cost the US would be willing to inflict on the rest of the planet in order to reroute and decouple tech supply chains to isolate China
It is the last card they have to play and its use it or lose it and if I was the US this is what I would do
