That’s So SiC: China Aims to Master an EV Chip You Haven’t Heard Of
China’s recent tech pivot marks a dramatic departure from the stellar run of the private sector-driven platform economy over the past long decade. In this new era, hardware reigns supreme. Toward that end, Beijing is already realigning investments, talent, and institutions, manifest in the very visible hand of industrial policy.
While much attention has been devoted to China chasing the technologies of tomorrow—from advanced chips to quantum computing—what’s equally important to Beijing is securing the technologies of today.
The latter is the focus of our “Tech Pivot in Practice” series because tech supply chains aren’t built with frontier technologies but rather with relatively mature, non-leading-edge technologies that have immediate commercial applications.
These technologies are crucial inputs into end products that few pay attention to because they don’t make the front pages. Yet these are the arenas in which China can dethrone market incumbents without having to invent the future. It simply has to deploy the present at scale to outcompete rivals on cost and market share.
