Tech Wars: Then and Now

Ideas have a tendency to spread

Secrets of the Middle Kingdom

For over a millennium, the world looked east to China. From the gleam of silk and the fragrance of tea to the translucence of porcelain and the terrible promise of gunpowder, Chinese innovations captivated and transformed the globe.

Yet behind these goods and the technologies that produced them is a story of state secrecy, export controls, and the unpredictable consequences of the diffusion of technology. It’s a story that resonates today.

Weaving Silk Empires

Silk was China's first great contribution to the global economy. As early as the third millennium BCE, Chinese weavers had mastered the delicate process of rearing silkworms, harvesting cocoons, and spinning the shimmering thread into cloth of unrivaled softness and luster. Under the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), silk became a massive export, traveling westward on the arteries of the eponymous Silk Road.

To the Romans, Chinese silk was an exotic marvel. It was seen as luxurious, mysterious, and even morally dubious. The Roman Senate passed laws banning men from wearing silk, and Seneca the Younger declared: “I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes... Wretched flocks of maids labour so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress…” (Declamations Vol. I)

The Chinese imperial court imposed strict penalties for those who attempted to smuggle silkworms or mulberry seeds. For centuries, the secret held. But in the sixth century AD, Byzantine monks smuggled silkworm eggs back to Constantinople in hollow bamboo canes. From there, sericulture spread across the Mediterranean and into Europe.

Porcelain

Perfected during the Tang and Song dynasties and elevated to an art in the Ming and Qing periods, Chinese porcelain dazzled foreign visitors. Smooth, durable, and impossibly delicate, it was created by firing fine clay at extreme temperatures. To Europeans, it seemed otherworldly. They called it "china."

Porcelain became a cornerstone of China's export economy from the 14th century onward. Monarchs like Louis XIV and Augustus the Strong collected it obsessively. Yet for centuries, European potters failed to replicate it. Only in 1708 did Johann Friedrich Böttger in Meissen, Germany, succeed in producing hard-paste porcelain.

The Global Leaf

Tea drinking began in China as early as the Shang dynasty, evolving into a cultural ritual by the Tang era. The Lu Yu’s book, The Tea Classic (8th century) made it a symbol of refinement. When tea reached Europe in the 17th century, it rapidly became an obsession, particularly in Britain.

The trade imbalance caused by all the silver flowing east for Chinese tea, led Britain to export Indian opium to China, culminating in the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60). But by the mid-19th century, British botanists had smuggled tea plants to India, breaking China's monopoly.

The Explosive Gift

Invented by Chinese alchemists in the Tang dynasty, gunpowder became a tool of war by the Song. The state guarded the formula closely. But the Mongol conquests of the 13th century spread gunpowder across Eurasia. By the 14th century, it had transformed European warfare.

From Secrecy to Globalization

Silk, porcelain, tea, and gunpowder. Each began as a Chinese innovation, cloaked in secrecy, obsessively guarded, and helping to cement China’s powerful geopolitical and economic position. Each also reshaped the world when that secrecy failed. Smuggled, reverse-engineered, or spilled out through war, ideas proved impossible to control in the long run. China’s early technological leadership was formidable, but secrecy proved no match for tenacity.

The Bloc That Couldn't Compute Enough to Compete

Today, it’s the West that is trying to control the spread of technology.

It had a successful trial run in controlling the spread of advanced technologies during the Cold War. Then, despite the advanced state of Soviet science and brilliance of its mathematicians, emerging tech was effectively suppressed by western embargoes.

The Eastern Bloc’s ambitious computing industry, spanning the Soviet Union and its satellite states, was killed off by Western export controls. COCOM, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, barred the sale of advanced Western tech to Communist states, forcing the Bloc into cloning and espionage.

Innovation gave way to duplication. The ES EVM system tried to replicate IBM’s System 360 but never matched its performance or ecosystem. Bulgaria, the Silicon Valley of the Communist bloc emerged as a hardware hub but could not keep up with Western transistor-making capabilities. Of course, the Soviet system didn’t help itself. Across the bloc, central planning stifled creativity. Software lagged, hardware was outdated, and systems were often incompatible.

Despite brilliant engineers and early promise, the bloc’s tech sector was never able to flourish. It collapsed under the weight of the U.S.-led embargo via COCOM, which only enhanced its own existing contradictions: autarky, cloning, bureaucratic mismanagement, and strategic rigidity. When the Cold War ended, Western systems quickly supplanted obsolete Soviet machines.

Chip Wars Redux: China, the U.S., and the New Tech Containment

Today, a new tech rivalry pits the U.S. against China. As during the Cold War, export controls aim to limit a rival’s military and technological ascent. The CHIPS Act, the Entity List, and restrictions on AI chips and EUV lithography echo COCOM’s embargoes.

But history doesn’t repeat—it rhymes. China is not the USSR. It is deeply embedded in global supply chains, a leader in 5G, drones, and e-commerce. Unlike the Eastern Bloc’s clone economy, China combines state planning with market dynamism. Huawei, ByteDance, and SenseTime are agile, globally competitive firms.

Still, China's vulnerabilities are real. It currently depends on foreign lithography and advanced chip designs. U.S. restrictions threaten access to the tools needed to compete. And Beijing's turn toward tighter state control, especially what appears to be crackdowns on tech tycoons, may risk repeating some of the Bloc’s innovation-chilling errors.

But for the U.S., there is danger in overreach. Blocking exports may delay China's progress, but it also spurs self-reliance. The race is not just about hardware but about investment and research.

Moreover, unlike the Cold War, this is a battle within an interdependent system, not between two separate blocs.

The Limits of Containment

From ancient China’s silk and porcelain to the Cold War’s computers and today's semiconductors, nations have tried to hoard and restrict key technologies. Sometimes they succeeded for centuries, but ideas and technologies have a tendency to spread.

Secrecy may slow diffusion, but historically it hasn’t been able to stop it.

In the end, ecosystems matter more than embargoes. China’s economic and technological ecosystem is deeply entwined with the rest of the world.

And in the chip wars of the 21st century, the winner will be not just the best innovator, but the one most adept at balancing control with openness, strategy with dynamism, and power with persuasion. We’re only in the opening stage of the latest tech battle between China and the rest of the world, and the winner is far from clear.