彭博雄文：芯片、丝绸、造纸术，你无法永远保守秘密
彭博社最近发了一篇雄文，全面反思了对华科技制裁反而导致中国科技大爆发的情况。现翻译如下，希望大家喜欢。
原文附后。
中国似乎已经制造出一种可以与西方一些最先进半导体相媲美的芯片。虽然这可能会让美国国防专家和制裁支持者感到震惊，但这一进展本不应该太令人惊讶。工业机密是不可能长久保守的，中国人自己就知道，几千年来，我们现在称之为知识产权的东西通过贸易、盗窃和战争的方式流失了。没有人能够垄断创新。
中国最新款智能手机采用了总部位于上海的中芯国际集成电路制造有限公司生产的芯片。麒麟 9000s 芯片仍比最先进的西方产品落后两代。麒麟 9000s 芯片只有 7 纳米，很快就会被苹果公司下一代 iPhone 使用的更薄的 3 纳米芯片超越。尽管如此，它仍然反映了一种漏洞，让技术诀窍通过美国严格的制裁溜走。
历史上有许多例子表明，尽管政府试图垄断，但技术仍在不断传播，其中大部分都对中国不利。几千年前，中国人就发展了养蚕业，将毛毛虫变成衣服的技术保密了几百年。但中国统治者需要中亚的马匹来发动战争和控制领土（正如杰西卡-罗森（Jessica Rawson）在她的巨著《古代中国的生命与来世》（Life and Afterlife in Ancient China）中所解释的，黄河流域的土壤中没有足够的硒元素，而硒元素是军马强壮的骨骼和肌肉所必需的）。因此，他们用丝绸换取合适的牲畜，并很快在国外产生了对这种织物的需求。由于丝绸对中国的武备需求至关重要，因此丝绸的秘密受到严格控制。违反禁令会导致死亡。
尽管如此，商业的回报还是通过所谓的 "丝绸之路 "从陆路和海路将这些材料运往西方，造成了世界上最早的贸易不平衡。据估计，罗马帝国在丝绸上的花费相当于其国内生产总值的 1%。传说拜占庭皇帝查士丁尼一世在 6 世纪打破了中国的垄断，当时他让两名景教僧侣将蚕卵和桑树苗装在竹箱里偷运回来。但我怀疑商人们在更早的时候就已经把养蚕的知识带到了西方，因为这种东西确实会溜走。因此，当查士丁尼把丝绸制造作为其工业政策的一部分时，丝绸制造就出现了爆炸式增长。拜占庭人在这方面越做越好。
中国对造纸业的垄断打破得更快（嗯，六个世纪），但也更显著，因为皇帝的军队在中亚的一场战役中输给了不断扩张的阿拔斯哈里发王朝的阿拉伯人。战俘中有军用造纸工人，他们将秘密带到了中东，并从那里向西传播。(军用火药和枪支的起源比较模糊，但这项技术可能是沿着同样的中亚路线向西传播的）。
瓷器--因其易于清洗而引发了一场健康和卫生革命--也在中国以外的世界广受欢迎。以至于中国至今仍是瓷器的代名词。从 12 世纪起，中国皇帝使用陶瓷的方式与他们使用丝绸的方式大同小异，都是为了获得对邻国的影响力，他们希望通过陶瓷培养自己的声望或政策。与此同时，商人们也会出售专为伊斯兰世界和欧洲特定市场设计的盘子和罐子。直到 18 世纪，德国迈森和法国利摩日的工厂才发现所需的粘土种类，并摸索出烧制真正瓷器的技术。
茶叶的故事更为人所熟知，但时至今日仍充满了地缘政治的余怒。与罗马人一样，英国人也面临着巨大的逆差，因为中国主导了一种产品，在这里就是茶叶。此外，北京的皇帝们并不觉得有必要放宽贸易政策来缓解外国的焦虑。于是，英国人决定通过向中国走私鸦片（一种违禁品）来纠正这种不平衡和僵局。这立即改变了贸易等式。中国的反对导致英国从 1838 年开始发动了两次鸦片战争，以自由贸易的名义打开了中国的大门。到本世纪末，屈辱和停滞的连环效应导致了清王朝的灭亡。
因此，中国是带着很多......呃，筹码来参加半导体竞赛的。与美国的军事对峙也帮不上什么忙。中国的爱国者们喜欢指出，中国必须 "发现 "自己的原子弹战争技术，以克服华盛顿和莫斯科对原子弹的联合垄断。现在，拜登政府对半导体技术的扼杀被视为西方压制中国重回第一的最新企图。北京因其千年来错误地试图实现自给自足而加深--仿佛 "中土王国 "可以不依赖世界其他国家而繁荣昌盛。
中国有可能还无法大量生产先进的芯片。或者说，中国还没有能力制造西方已经在消费产品中使用的最先进的半导体。同样，如果他们在这方面做得更好，也不足为奇--尤其是路透社报道称，中国政府正在筹集 400 亿美元支持国内芯片产业。美国可以随时收紧制裁制度，加强保障措施，以减缓扩散速度。但商业几乎总是会迫使技术秘密外流。
更大的情况更不祥。如果中国和美国继续利用贸易和技术来进行称霸世界的零和游戏，那么我们都有可能成为等式中的 "零"。
By Howard Chua-Eoan
China appears to have built a chip that matches some of the West’s most advanced semiconductors. While it may alarm US defense experts and sanctions proponents, the development shouldn’t have been too surprising. Industrial secrets are impossible to keep for long, as the Chinese themselves know from millennia of what we’d now call intellectual property lost by way of trade, theft and war. No one has a monopoly on innovation.
The progress toward parity with the West was revealed in a teardown conducted for Bloomberg News of the latest smartphone from xxxx Technologies Co., which utilizes a chip made by Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. The Kirin 9000s chip is still two generations behind the most advanced Western products. At 7 nanometers, it will soon be outdistanced by the even thinner 3-nanometer chip that Apple Inc. will use in its next iPhone. Still, it reflects a porousness that lets knowhow slip through stringent US sanctions.
History has lots of examples of technology spreading in spite of government attempts at monopoly — mostly to the detriment of China. The Chinese had developed sericulture thousands of years ago, managing to keep the techniques for turning caterpillars into clothing a secret for hundreds of years. But the rulers of China needed Central Asian horses to wage war and control their territory (As Jessica Rawson explains in her magisterial Life and Afterlife in Ancient China, the soil in the Yellow River valley doesn’t have enough of the selenium required for the strong bones and muscles of military breeds). And so they traded silk for the right animals and quickly generated demand for the fabric outside the country. Because silk was key to China’s martial-equine needs, its secrets were strictly controlled. Breaking the sanctions could lead to death.
Still, the rewards of commerce moved the material westward by land and sea via the so-called “silk routes,” causing one of the world’s first trade imbalances. One estimate had the Roman Empire spending the equivalent of 1% of its gross domestic product on the cloth. Legend has it that the Chinese monopoly was broken by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in the 6th century when he had two Nestorian monks smuggle back silkworm eggs in bamboo cases plus seedlings of the mulberry tree they fed on. But I suspect traders had already brought knowledge of silkworm cultivation to the West much earlier, just because such things do slip through. Hence, the explosion of silk manufacturing when Justinian made it part of his industrial policy. The Byzantines just got better at it.
China’s monopoly on paper manufacturing was broken much faster (well, six centuries) but more dramatically, after the emperor’s army lost a battle in Central Asia to the Arabs of the expanding Abbasid caliphate. Among the prisoners of war were military paper-makers who brought their secrets to the Middle East, from where it spread further west. (The origins of gunpowder for military use and guns is a little more nebulous, but the technology may have coursed westward along the same Central Asian routes.)
Porcelain — which sparked a health and sanitation revolution because of the ease with which it could be cleaned — was also much desired outside the Chinese world. So much so that China is still a synonym for the wares. From the 12th century on, Chinese emperors used the ceramics in much the same way they used silk, to gain influence over neighboring countries they wished to cultivate for reasons of prestige or policy. At the same time, traders would sell plates and jars designed for specific markets in the Islamic world and in Europe. It was not until the 18th century that factories in Meissen in Germany and Limoges in France discovered the kind of clay required and figured out the firing techniques to create true porcelain.
The story of tea is more familiar but still fraught with residual geopolitical indignation to this day. As with the Romans, the British faced a huge deficit because China dominated one product, in this case, tea. Furthermore, the emperors in Beijing didn’t feel the need to liberalize their trade policies to alleviate foreign anxieties. And so the English decided to correct the imbalance and the impasse by smuggling opium — a banned substance — into China. That immediately changed the trade equation. Chinese objections led to the British waging two Opium Wars, beginning in 1838, to open the country in the name of free trade. By the end of the century, the cascading effects of humiliation and stagnation led to the fall of the Qing dynasty.
So China comes to the semiconductor contest with a lot of… uhm, chips on its shoulder. Nothing is helped by the military faceoff with the US. Chinese patriots like to point out that the country had to “discover” its own way to atomic war technology to overcome the joint monopoly over the bomb by Washington and Moscow. Now the Biden administration’s semiconductor stranglehold is seen as just the latest attempts by the West to suppress China’s destined path back to No. 1. Beijing’s belligerence is deepened by its own millennia-long and misguided attempts to achieve autarky — as if the “Middle Kingdom” could thrive without the rest of the world.
It’s possible that the Chinese aren’t yet able to make advanced chips in quantity. Or make the state-of-the-art semiconductors the West is already deploying in consumer products. Again, it won’t be surprising if they just get better at it — especially if the government is raising $40 billion to support the domestic chip industry, as Reuters reports. The US can always tighten its sanctions regimes and strengthen the safeguards to slow the proliferation. But commerce will almost always force out technological secrets.
The bigger picture is more ominous. If China and the US continue to use trade and technology in a zero-sum game of world domination, we are all likely to end up on the zero end of the equation.