With a conflict between the United States and China that is already beginning to show signs of being indefinite in time, the Asian country has maneuvered in recent years to have more technological independence from the American giants. Here the road has nothing new seeing that Linux is out there and that China it has the potential to equip itself with the necessary hardware, and that is precisely what it tries to do, at least for the IT infrastructure of its public administration.
As reported by Bloomberg, the government led by Xi Jinpin would have ordered government offices and state-backed companies to replace foreign-brand computer equipment with others that can be kept entirely within their borders. The intention is to carry out the plan in the next two years and in central government agencies alone 50 million computers could be replaced..
China’s intentions to achieve more technological independence are far from new, but rather are a recurring theme that usually appears from time to time in the media. For years, the country has not only been the cheap factory for Western brands, but has also been able to develop its own quality technology with which to face the United States that is increasingly concerned about its loss of hegemony.
At the hardware level, the main victims point to being well-known brands such as Dell and HP, while local manufacturers such as Lenovo and Huawei could benefit greatly. at the software level Kingsoft and Standard Software could benefit to the detriment of companies like Microsoft and Adobe. In fact, Chinese companies are already seeing their shares rise on the local stock market in reaction to the measures taken by the government.
At the operating system level the logical thing is that Windows ends up being replaced by Linux. On this front there is Deepin, whose origin is in the Asian country and that little by little has been making a dent in the harsh landscape of Linux distributions, where it is not easy to stand out among the saturated supply (there are more than 300 distributions) and the few users there are. On the other hand we have HarmonyOS, which was Huawei’s response to the US veto.
The technological independence maneuvers carried out during the last decade have been answered by companies such as Microsoft and HP, which have done business in conjunction with companies backed by the Chinese government in order to guarantee supply to a good customer. And despite government urging, locally developed technology has run into shortcomings forcing it to turn to foreign suppliers, compounded by the fact that Lenovo has been unable to ditch the likes of Intel and AMD.
It will be necessary to see how far the order to replace equipment with foreign technology for another of local origin really goes.since there are components such as processors and dedicated graphics that are not easy to replace, so they are likely to be exempt from such an order.
