"China has legally purchased high performance computers, advanced machine tools, and semiconductor-manufacturing equipment from several American companies"
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A sentence like this isn’t trying to inform you; it’s trying to corner you. “Legally purchased” is the tell: the clause preemptively swats away any easy villain story about espionage or stolen IP, then pivots to the more uncomfortable implication that the problem isn’t criminality, it’s policy. Bass frames the transaction as compliant, aboveboard capitalism, which forces the listener to confront a harder question: if China’s technological rise is alarming, why did American rules and American firms help supply it?
The list is doing political work, too. “High performance computers,” “advanced machine tools,” and “semiconductor-manufacturing equipment” are not consumer gadgets; they’re the upstream infrastructure of modern power. It’s a rhetorical inventory of dual-use capability: the same tools that drive productivity and profits can also accelerate military modernization, surveillance capacity, and industrial self-sufficiency. By naming categories rather than brands or models, the line invites the audience to imagine a broad pipeline rather than a one-off sale.
Contextually, this kind of phrasing sits in the post-Cold War, pre-CHIPS-era tension between free trade optimism and national-security anxiety. It’s a critique aimed less at Beijing than at Washington’s own incentives: export controls full of loopholes, corporate lobbying, and the tendency to treat strategic industries as just another market until consequences arrive. The subtext is blunt: America didn’t merely “lose” advantage; it sometimes cashed it out.
The list is doing political work, too. “High performance computers,” “advanced machine tools,” and “semiconductor-manufacturing equipment” are not consumer gadgets; they’re the upstream infrastructure of modern power. It’s a rhetorical inventory of dual-use capability: the same tools that drive productivity and profits can also accelerate military modernization, surveillance capacity, and industrial self-sufficiency. By naming categories rather than brands or models, the line invites the audience to imagine a broad pipeline rather than a one-off sale.
Contextually, this kind of phrasing sits in the post-Cold War, pre-CHIPS-era tension between free trade optimism and national-security anxiety. It’s a critique aimed less at Beijing than at Washington’s own incentives: export controls full of loopholes, corporate lobbying, and the tendency to treat strategic industries as just another market until consequences arrive. The subtext is blunt: America didn’t merely “lose” advantage; it sometimes cashed it out.
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| Topic | Technology |
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