Chinese authorities plan to ditch all foreign-made tech by 2023
See how you don't get to like them Apples
by Chris MerrimanCHINA HAS DEMANDED that all foreign computer equipment and software be stripped out from government and public offices by the end of 2022.
The move, reported by the Financial Times, adds a new layer of permafrost to the ongoing spat between the US and China. It comes after the White House added several Chinese companies to its "Entity List" of firms considered to be a national security risk and therefore excluded from trading with American companies, without a specific licence.
The FT estimates that 20 to 30 million pieces of equipment would need replacing, with the bulk of the work happening in 2021.
This is far from the first time that China has threatened to boycott Western tech. Around the time of Windows 8, Chinese TV News carried a prime time report claiming that the operating system was "spyware".
Around the same time, the country announced a process of "Dewindowsifying" (its words), with plans to move to a homegrown Linux variant. That plan was abandoned after Microsoft agreed to produce a special edition of Windows for the country that complied with local laws - and you can draw your own conclusions as to what that means.
It's not clear how strict the Chinese authorities plan to be. For example, Lenovo is a Chinese company, but the chips come from Intel, which is American.
One option could be to create special edition machines using Huawei's Kirin chips instead of Intel or AMD, but that's just our little theory.
Although this is the first tangible evidence of China sanctioning Western technology since the Entity List shenanigans began, it doesn't seem to be aimed at the US specifically, but rather is part of ongoing self-sufficiency drives in the country, and in fact, was going to happen at some point anyway.
That being the case, if the idea wasn't to annoy Baby Trump, the timing of this move couldn't be much worse. But that's a big 'if'. μ
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