The comments you made about political systems indicate you don't really grasp my point.
- Governments are formed of people. People make mistakes.
- Power tends to corrupt, and the likelihood of corruption scales with the quantity of power and the quantity of people passing through the role (that is, one person may truly have best interests at heart, but will their successor? Or their successor?)
The result of the above is that when assessing long term stability of systems, problems that can happen inevitably will. If a system allows massive sweeping changes, then they will happen, and eventually an incorrect one will be made.
For example, let's take the scenario above, where Chinese companies were ordered to begin using Chinese GPUs. Did that work out? Yes. Could it have gone poorly? Yes.
Will every similar decision go as well? No. Thus, a situation where the "you must use Chinese GPUs" dictation is possible, is less stable than one where it is not.
You brought up a comparison to the US, because the US and China always get compared I guess? The US does this sort of thing more weakly, so gains less instability from this particular source of instability. Whether it's currently more unstable in other ways is left as an exercise for the reader.
You're commenting from the post-reagan consensus, which inevitably leads to Intel's current situation. But it doesn't have to be like that, America had a different consensus from 1930-1970.
(BTW, deepseek was trained on nvidia.)
Xi doesn't personally set every industrial policy in China, its a ton of people all over the country. Culture.
What I'm saying reduces down to, "the scale of effect that humans are able to have on a system, will eventually lead to problems of that scale on a system".
If you can dictate that all industries within a country must do some thing, that will eventually cause problems with all industries within the country.
Culture doesn't really have anything to do with it. Whether the person making that dictation is Xi or Trump or some random bureaucrat doesn't really have anything to do with it.
There are thousands of bureaucratic orgs and corporations making their own calls, deepseek and qwen were both trained on nvidia hardware, while several chip startups and SMIC ramp up.
The nature of those calls is influenced by culture. If you have a culture of MBAs, you get Intel's actions over the last 15 years.
And, to the point of the article, SMIC is already doing 5nm manufacturing.
Political systems are more complex than dictator/freedom, there are lots of stakeholders. The USA stakeholders tend to be short-term focused financial engineers, this is separate from whether we have checks and balances or what color tie the President wears.