In its tech war with America, China brings out the big guns

IN THE TECHAIASMLAI battle between , the Western power has been more aggressive of late. Last year President Joe Biden’s administration laid out harsh restrictions limiting Chinese artificial-intelligence () companies’ access to American technology. America has also been coaxing allies to follow its lead. On June 30th the Netherlands, under pressure from the White House, announced that it would restrict the sales of some chipmaking equipment to China: , a Dutch maker of the world’s most advanced lithography machines, will from now on sell Chinese customers only low-yield devices for etching cutting-edge chips. On July 4th the reported that the American government may be preparing to curb Chinese use of American cloud-computing services, which enable Chinese firms to circumvent America’s earlier sanctions by taking advantage of the cloud provider’s high-end processors without owning chips of their own.China’s communist authorities had so far responded to this barrage of tats with a single, relatively meagre tit: in May it barred some Chinese companies from using memory chips made by Micron, a company from Idaho. But on July 3rd it brought out a bigger gun, saying that it would impose export controls on gallium and germanium, two metals used in high-end semiconductors.