China’s sanctions-hit tech industry is wondering about the impact of the Trump and Harris presidencies

The policies Harris would adopt from President Joe Biden “are more long-term, coordinated and predictable, which could bring more stable but long-lasting challenges to China’s semiconductor industry,” the editorial said.

Trump’s unpredictability is confirmed in statements and posts on social media. During his presidency, he expressed his willingness to change course regarding the measures he took against Huawei and fellow ZTE. During his current campaign, he has railed against a ban on Chinese social media app Tik Tok, which he himself proposed during his time in office.

A July editorial in EETop, an information platform and forum for Chinese electronics companies, said Trump’s criticism of US trade ties with allies such as Europe, Japan and South Korea – which in turn have interests in China – would jeopardize cooperation can bring. This would mean that “particularly in the globalized chain of the semiconductor industry, unilateral repression by the United States is ineffective.”

“It is possible that Europe and the Netherlands would deliberately make it easy for us (to circumvent restrictions) so that we could import EUVs,” the editorial said. China relies on foreign extreme ultraviolet lithography machines and is excluded from the most capable.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Regardless of who wins the election, China’s technology sector is much more domestically focused and self-sufficient than when Trump or Biden took office, according to analysts and a Reuters data survey.

The trade war has seen a variety of tit-for-tat strikes, such as Chinese export restrictions on rare earths, but it has also pushed China’s tech industry to insulate itself from sanctions.

In 2016, China had four government procurement projects worth more than 10 million yuan ($1.4 million), replacing foreign hardware and software with domestic alternatives, a Reuters review of tenders shows. This year there were 169 such projects; 75 involved more than 50 million yuan in state funds.

Even if Trump or Harris were to tighten export controls, domestic manufacturers are now much less dependent on foreign technology and better prepared to deal with the impact of changes in the trade environment.

“We have slowed them down in semiconductors, but you can dream further in other sectors such as robots,” said Robert D. Atkinson, chairman of the Washington DC-based Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. “They can get everything they need internally.”