James Laurenceson, director and professor at the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, said the impact of the US policy hardly seemed to have registered in Australia.
The updated export rules are claimed to be aimed at restricting "the PRC’s [People Republic of China's] ability to obtain advanced computing chips, develop and maintain supercomputers, and manufacture advanced semiconductors".
Laurenceson said analysts outside government — which has painted the curbs as being targeted to blunt China's military modernisation and alleged human rights abuses — were of one voice that Washington was trying to cut off Beijing's access to foundational technologies in order to remain economic top dog.
He cited a number of analysts, such as Hal Brands from John Hopkins University who had written that by homing in on chips, "the US is seeking to hinder Chinese economic dynamism and military muscle alike".
Another analyst cited was Klon Kitchen of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute who had written: "These new actions show the United States is not simply trying to slow China’s technological advancement, but to arrest and contain it."
Well-known American economist David P. Goldman warned in an op-ed written for Asia Times that the restrictions would affect Washington more than Beijing in the long run.
He wrote that the modest subsidies extended by the US Government to the chip industry would be outstripped by the harm caused to capital investment and research and development in Western industry by a factor of five or more.
Laurenceson said Australia should realise that this kind of zero-sum game would not be in its interests.
"Canberra must now come to grips with a basic reality spelt out by Jon Bateman at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 'America’s restrictionists — zero-sum thinkers who urgently want to accelerate technological decoupling — have won the strategy debate inside the Biden administration'.
"Bateman also flags the likelihood of decoupling measures spreading to other sectors that the bipartisan anti-Beijing consensus in Washington might readily come to regard as 'strategic', including biotech, manufacturing and finance."
He pointed to a statement made by Peter Varghese, former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in 2019: “Containing China … is a policy dead end … [for Australia]. And the notion that global technology supply chains can be divided into a China-led system and a US-led system is both economic and geopolitical folly."
Laurenceson pointed out that China's per-capita incomes were less than a third of those in the US. "Hobbling China’s AI ambitions will not preclude Beijing from implementing domestic reforms that could readily see per-capita incomes approach half that of US levels," he noted. "Australia need not feel compelled to fall into line in this US containment of China.
"Differences in population size then mean that Beijing will have double the aggregate economic heft of Washington to turn towards advancing its geopolitical objectives. This includes investing in its own technological self-sufficiency."
He warned that unilateral sanctions tended to be leaky and many southeast Asian countries appeared to be uneasy with the approach taken by the US.
"At a joint press conference with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last Tuesday, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said he was worried that the direction Washington’s chips controls hastened could lead to 'less economic co-operation, less inter-dependency, less trust, and possibly, ultimately a less stable world'," Laurenceson said.
