New instructions ask the Chinese administration to switch within two years to computers made by local companies. Tens of millions of positions are affected.
The Chinese administration intends to carry out a huge sweep of its computer equipment within the next two years. The objective of this great upheaval, as reported by Bloomberg at the beginning of May? Dismiss foreign computers in favor of national solutions, against a backdrop of issues of autonomy, geopolitics and espionage.
The equipment exclusion program in question is considerable: we are talking about the replacement in a relatively short period of time of at least 50 million computers within the large administrations, but also in the lower state levels, as well as in certain companies with very close ties to the Chinese state apparatus.
In parallel with the major maneuvers on the PC side, there is also talk of doing without Western operating systems, namely Windows. Microsoft’s operating system should be discarded in favor of solutions based on Linux, a free OS. The movement is not recent: echoes of this type have been coming out of China for years to dismiss Windows.
In fact, it is the major American PC manufacturers who will suffer the blow. Brands like HP and Dell will still be able to operate in China, and sell to individuals and private businesses, but their market size is shrinking. Conversely, this offers a boulevard for local manufacturers, whether Lenovo, Huawei or Inspur.
China is increasing its autonomy in tech
The reorientation of the Chinese state’s computer equipment, which also affects the use of software, is to be put in a double context: that of the embargo which hits Huawei in the United States, which put it in great difficulty in the West, and that of the difficulty of supplying electronic components, which puts the whole market under tension.
The problems that have affected the entire industry for two years are indeed likely to thwart Beijing’s plan to increase the autonomy of the public sector in technological matters, both in terms of hardware and software. The country could come up against obstacles to fulfilling its plan in due time, and with the desired scale.
The independence that China is clearly seeking in IT still retains some blind spots, at least in the short and medium term. Indeed, even if the country uses Chinese manufacturers and uses Chinese or adapted software, certain components remain under foreign control – Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, Samsung, LG, etc.
We know that China is very dependent on external supplies, especially for certain cutting-edge technologies. Admittedly, Beijing is striving to hatch a semiconductor industry capable of competing with the tenors of the genre, but it is still one or two generations behind. This was seen with the effects of the embargo on Huawei.
This decision taken by China is part of a larger movement to fight for access to technology. We have seen manifestations of this with “the heist of the century”, where we have seen the subsidiary of ARM in China take off, or even the efforts of the United States to hinder China on the military use of supercomputers