Depth report

　　

The United States banned ZTE, and the "Chip Marshal" was promoted in the Chinese public opinion field.

    The Americans blocked ZTE, but did not block Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, etc. It can be seen that this is not a blockade between countries. However, this still caused an illusory sense of humiliation, so the matter became: the United States blocked China. In the past few days, public opinion at all levels in China has been enthusiastically talking about chips. Many people even angered with other industries, saying that the competition between countries depends on shared bicycles and takeaways. The implication is that Chinese people are impetuous and only value short-term money making, ignoring the accumulation of technology.

National competition?

    This argument of national competition is valid from a certain angle. But at the same time it also hides the premise and is biased. Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, New Zealand, and Canada do not have their own mobile phone chips in the current international division of labor. However, the health and well-being of the people in these countries, and the post-World War II world order also guarantees that they will not be threatened by outsiders. They are not losers in national competition, but winners. In the current international trading system, they do not need to have all of this, they can rely on international trade, and they do not feel humiliated and failed.

    In fact, China is far better than these countries. The commercial innovation models of fighter jets, weapons, missiles, automobiles, high-speed rail, photovoltaics, and even the Internet can be said to occupy the high-end of the international industry. Therefore, to a large extent, the current public opinion obsessed with going to the high end of the industry chain is not so much a high-end, as it refers to a high-end and comprehensive. This is an ambitious goal. After all, developed industrial countries such as Britain, France and Germany do not have a complete technology tree. Even the United States, its chips rely on the international division of labor.

    Desire to obtain a complete science and technology tree is a myth peculiar to Chinese people. In the final analysis, ideological confrontation led to a technological blockade, which made it necessary to obtain a complete technological tree. On the other hand, it renders a sense of humiliation, which produces a self-reliant industry chain myth, and the chip myth is the latest example.

    Catch up! Catch up!

    Self-reliance is essentially an industry catching up.

    There are many ways to catch up. The most market-oriented comparative advantage strategy generally starts from the low end of the industrial chain and climbs slowly, and the speed is slow. More importantly, the comparative advantage strategy does not lead to a comprehensive and complete industrial system in theory, and cannot satisfy all-round competition. the goal. Therefore, market-oriented catch-up cannot meet China's short-term and comprehensive goal of catching up with the rise of a great power.

    The other is corner overtaking, that is, when new technologies appear, they use the same uncertainty about the technology, or just a combination of mature technologies, or business models, to overtake in one fell swoop. At this point, whether it is electric vehicles, solar panels, or various Internet business models, China has done a good job.

    Another is to use subsidies and other industrial policies to distort product and factor prices, and even replace market mechanisms with a planned system to improve the country's ability to mobilize resources, to invest cheap and intensive resources in a certain industry, and implement import substitution policies. To put it vividly, it is a straight road forcibly overtaking. To a certain extent, what the current public opinion is calling for, seems to be able to satisfy the chip myth, and seems to be able to achieve the short-term rise of great powers.

    There is nothing new under the sun, and overtaking on the straight has already been done.

    The industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1920s was very small. The Soviet government adopted a non-market mechanism, used the state’s monopoly position to distort the prices of wages, energy, raw materials and other factors, and exchanged unequal prices for industrial and agricultural products; it used low interest rate policies, low exchange rate policies, inflation, and sacrificed current consumption. Compulsory industrialization accumulation and the development of heavy industry. The Soviet Union succeeded in catching up. But at the same time, it caused an imbalance in the industrial system and a low standard of living of the people. There was once a Soviet political joke: The Soviet Union can build the best passenger plane, and people from Siberia can rush to Moscow to queue up to buy bread, and then return on the same day. Under the continuous catch-up strategy, the Soviet Union misjudged and was induced by the United States to enter the arms race catch-up and finally collapsed.

    China's history of catching up and surpassing is even more serious. It was not until reform and opening up that China emerged from the catch-up strategy.

    After abandoning the catch-up strategy, China used a market-based mechanism to straighten out factor prices, and emphasized more people's livelihood, more economic freedom for the people, and more consumption. Subsequently, China joined the WTO and integrated into the international system. Since then, in less than 20 years, China's steel production reached the world's largest steel output in the late 1990s and has remained there ever since. Its output is more than the total output of the 2-8 countries, and overcapacity has become the top problem. In 2012, China's shipbuilding completion volume, new orders received, and hand-held orders, these three major world shipbuilding indicators, reached the first in the world.

    History and the Chinese made an extremely heavy but ironic joke.

    In the planned economy period, under the catch-up strategy, even if the iron pan was smashed and the starvation fell to the ground, such output could not be obtained. After giving up catching up, China has developed rapidly. In fact, if it were not for this catch-up strategy, China's industrialization process could actually be faster. History is not far away, but people can't wait to forget it.

Is the subsidy effective?

    Companies are profit-oriented and act in accordance with economic laws. No company is willing to engage in chips. The wages of practitioners are low. It is not because of lack of feelings and the Chinese are too impetuous, but because of the level of economic development, global free trade division of labor, scientific research system, and even long-term Property rights arrangements are not inclined to engage in chips on their own.

    The economy has its own laws. When China's technology, economy, and manufacturing reach that point, it will naturally do so. In fact, after years of development, the domestic semiconductor ecosystem has gradually been established, and the three industries of design, manufacturing, packaging and testing are increasingly balanced. Of course, industrial upgrading under the market mechanism is relatively slow. It is far less exciting than advocating industrial policies, which can expand departmental power and budget. Therefore, Lin Yifu advocates the new structuralism of the government to identify industrial advantages and make best use of the situation, and become a guest of the government, while Zhang Weiying's market theory always has subtle dangers.

    Subsidies and industrial policies are of course useful, but efficiency is always in doubt. Of course, given China's current economic volume, a limited amount of blood transfusion to the chip industry will not hurt your muscles, but if you really want to catch up in the fields of CPU, GPU, analog chips, etc., it is not necessarily effortless. Chips are not space stations, rockets, missiles, and other national projects, but market behaviors that focus on cost-effectiveness, yield, and profit. Under these goals, US chips are also the result of the global division of labor. China's completely independent chip system is likely to encounter problems such as low performance, low yield, and high cost. It needs government subsidies and needs to be sustained for a long time. Research also requires a lot of basic research as support and money. Then, it is inevitable to squeeze the people's livelihood budget in other areas.

    More importantly, what is the efficiency of distorting the factors that should be allocated according to the principles of marketization? To be sure, a group of people are going to make a fortune. The Hanxin scandal of erasing foreign company logos with sandpaper is not far away, and the large-scale fraud of new energy vehicles to defraud state financial subsidies is no end. Obviously, without subsidies, private capital investment companies would never deceive themselves in this way.

    The chip industry simply follows the development, which involves huge investment. To stand at the world's leading level, a large amount of R&D investment is needed. These R&D investment is large, slow to take effect, long cycle, and full of risks. Obviously, this requires long-term and stable expectations for entrepreneurs; the establishment of a complete intellectual property protection system; and a transparent and open scientific research system are far from being accomplished overnight. More importantly, these things involve more basic systems. So, to some extent, if the chip is the jewel in the crown of industry, then it is also the crystallization of a series of systems.

Industrial policies and subsidies will inevitably fall into another vicious circle. The meaning of a community with a shared future for mankind must include "you cannot do without me, and I cannot do without you". Using a non-market approach, trying to quickly grasp the complete science and technology tree, at a small point, is the embodiment of the smallholder consciousness in the field of international relations and international trade, and at a larger level, it reflects China’s distrust of peace and development. It will inevitably trigger further backlash from the outside world.

Country and people

    Two years after the end of the famine, in 1963, a boy was born. Throughout his teenage years, he was in the stage of catching up and surpassing strategies, with material poverty and full of various tickets; when he became an adult, he experienced a life of rapid prosperity. Perhaps it is these two contrasts that made him describe the technological catch-up of mankind in this way in his novel "Three Body", which describes the struggle between humans and aliens: after the Great Depression brought about by technological catch-up, mankind I gave up catching up and turned to focus on my current life, but technological progress has appeared rapidly. Yes, even though Liu Cixin can be regarded as an "industrial party" with the feeling of "the journey is the stars and the sea", he still wrote the famous "giving time to civilization, not to civilization". After all, only after experiencing material poverty can we understand that the fundamental purpose of everything is to live peacefully and well.

    Take-out, shared bicycles, online ride-hailing, and small restaurants on the street, these things, from a certain angle, are no less than chips. They are typical examples under the guidance of the market economy model. The market economy has brought people's health and happiness, and provided long-term stability and performance legitimacy. China's rapid development in the past 40 years has been the result of the allocation of resources by the market, that is to say, the result of abandoning heavy industry to catch up. In fact, abandoning grand goals, paying attention to daily life, seeking personal happiness, and self-realization motivation are the real driving force of economic development and technological economy. This was the case when the US semiconductor industry first emerged in the 1960s; the eight rebels of Fairchild, the originator of the American chip industry, were also the same; and China’s rapid development was the same. Therefore, the essential problem behind the chip myth and catch-up strategy is: how to understand the relationship between the country and people. To a certain extent, under the unreal humiliating education, Chinese public opinion has lost the ability to view the world from the perspective of individuals, ordinary people, and oneself. Instead, it is replaced by a frequent perspective of a big country and feelings of family and country.

    72 years after Einstein gave up his German citizenship permanently, Germany, the country originally abandoned by Einstein, decided to name 2005 the "Einstein Year" and decided to engrave Einstein's political creed on the government building: The country is established for people, and people do not live for the country.

    Therefore, if ZTE was banned this time, it would not be a blessing for the country if the chip myth is aroused. Industrial policies and financial subsidies are indispensable. However, if it is too late, China’s future industry catch-up strategy still needs to respect the market mechanism, and cannot be driven by fanaticism or sacrifice people’s welfare. National competition should serve the people after all, "giving the people chips instead of giving people the chips." Dedicating the country to the diligence and wisdom of the Chinese people, rather than dedicating the diligence and wisdom of the Chinese people to the country, only in this way can China truly win in the national competition.