The Chinese Communist Party’s hypersonic missile technology depends on the use of supercomputers, whose core chips are obtained through a Taiwanese company that exploits U.S. technology control loopholes.
The Washington Post on Wednesday (March 7) ran a lengthy story on how Chinese supercomputer company Tianjin Feiteng Information Technology Co. obtained key chips from the United States to provide supercomputers for the development of the Chinese military’s most advanced weapons.
The following day, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced Thursday (8) that it had blacklisted seven Chinese supercomputer entities, including Tianjin Feiteng, for assisting the Chinese Communist Party’s military and destabilizing operations.
While this move could slow down the CCP’s development of supersonic missile technology to some extent, it remains to be seen whether it will completely block the CCP from continuing to acquire key supercomputer chip technology from the United States through existing channels. So how does the CCP obtain core chips through frontier companies?
CCP’s Low-Profile Hypersonic Weapons Experiment in Mianyang
A simulation of the heat and drag of a hypersonic vehicle as it flies through the atmosphere is being run at a secret military facility in southwestern China, with a supercomputer whirring away.
The simulation facility is located in Mianyang, Sichuan province, which is home to the Communist Party’s Nuclear Weapons Research Center and also the Aerodynamics Research and Development Center (CARDC). CARDC is the largest aerodynamics research facility in China.
According to former U.S. officials as well as U.S. and Australian researchers, the center has 18 wind tunnels and is currently heavily involved in hypersonic weapons research.
Tai-Ming Chang, director of the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, described the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center as the beating heart of the Communist Party’s hypersonic research and development.
The center has been on a U.S. trade blacklist since 1999 for helping with “missile proliferation. By 2016, the U.S. Department of Commerce had further tightened restrictions on the center’s export technology.
The center’s director, Fan Zhaolin, is a major general in the Chinese Communist Party, and his ties to the Chinese military are deliberately omitted from both his online profile and his external contacts.
Chinese Communist Party soldiers visit a Dongfang-1 missile on display at the Military Museum in Beijing, December 06, 2004. (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
Weapons Experiments Need Supercomputer to Help Feiteng Become Springboard
Because supersonic weapons experiments need supercomputers to help them, the Feiteng is the logical springboard.
Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said that to make hypersonic missiles work, hundreds of different thermal, vehicle lift and atmospheric drag settings would need to be analyzed, and physical tests alone would be too expensive and time-consuming.
“If you don’t have a supercomputer, it could take a decade,” he said.
Long-standing cooperation exists between the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center and Feiteng
Publicly available paper materials show that researchers at the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center refer to their supercomputers using Feiteng’s 1500 and 2000 series chips in papers published in 2018 and 2019.
The center is currently developing the Tianhe 3 supercomputer – capable of handling 100 trillion calculations per second at “hyperscale” speeds – with Feiteng, the National University of Defense Technology and the Tianjin Supercomputing Center. According to Chinese state media, the computer uses Feiteng’s 2000 series chips.
Most Feiteng executives are former National Defense University officers
Founded in August 2014, Feiteng was created by the state-owned conglomerate China Electronics Corporation (CEC), the Tianjin National Supercomputing Center and the Tianjin municipal government. The National Supercomputing Center is a laboratory managed by the National University of Defense Science and Technology.
After the U.S. listed the Tianjin National Supercomputing Center and the University of Defense Science and Technology as entities in 2015, Feiteng emerged as the new Chinese supercomputer company through which sanctioned Chinese Communist Party military entities engage in foreign core product procurement under the name of private “trade.
Although Feiteng claims to be China’s leading independent core chip supplier, according to government records, it sells server and video game microprocessors for which its shareholders and major customers are Chinese government departments and the military.
The WaPo reports that Feiteng portrays itself as a commercial company that aspires to be a global chip giant like Intel; however, records show that Feiteng’s ownership has changed hands over the years, but its shareholders often have ties to the Communist Party’s military, only it has never made those ties public.
Eric Lee, a research associate at the Project 2049 Institute, a Northern Virginia think tank that studies Indo-Pacific strategy, told WaPo that Feiteng behaves at first glance like an independent commercial company, “with its executives in civilian clothes, but most of them are former military officers from the National University of Defense Technology.”
Circumventing chip censorship of supercomputers in the name of trade
Two U.S. Silicon Valley companies — Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Synopsys — have been supplying the chip designs needed for Feiteng.
In 10 years in China, I haven’t met a Chinese chip design company that doesn’t use the services of Synopsys or Cadence,” Stewart Randall, a consultant who sells electronic design automation software to top Chinese chipmakers, told WaPo. “
Such trade practices, while not theoretically illegal, do exploit a loophole in an important part of the global high-tech supply chain – since the same computer chips can be used in both commercial data centers and to power military supercomputers – and are difficult to regulated by the host country.
In addition, the U.S. high-tech company’s cooperation with China’s Frontier and the CCP’s military research institute reaffirms the CCP’s “civil-military” strategy – how the CCP uses Frontier to buy U.S. technology, circumvent censorship, and quietly use civilian technology for military strategic purposes.
The chip is known as the brain of modern electronics, limiting development in everything from clean energy to quantum computing.
It is an area that the Chinese Communist Party has invested heavily in and wants to prioritize, but so far no Chinese company has been able to sustain the chip sector on its own, as this high-tech field relies on years of basic theoretical research and development and cannot be seized by a quick “buy and steal” model.
Chips are now China’s top import, worth more than $300 billion annually.
U.S. President Joe Biden holds a chip as he speaks before signing an executive order to safeguard key supply chains at the White House in Washington, Feb. 24, 2021. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
U.S. finally wakes up to Chinese Communist Party’s tight focus on foreign military technology
In 2014, the U.S. Air Force released an unclassified report on space warfare technology, including hypersonic technology.
Mark Lewis, former acting undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and director of defense research and engineering for modernization, told WaPo that the public document was available to anyone, and naturally the Chinese Communist Party was not in the picture; that’s when the Chinese began studying the latest U.S. research and sending scientists to U.S. conferences, and when China began investing in related projects at home.
“(The Chinese Communist Party) saw the military advantage that hypersonic technology could give them, and they acted.” Lewis said. “The U.S., on the other hand, has basically let its foot off the gas and is not in a hurry and is not grasping at straws.”
That shifted a bit after former President Donald Trump (R) took office. The Pentagon became concerned about the Communist Party’s major investments in hypersonic technology.
Hypersonic technology can propel missiles to travel at greater than five times the speed of sound and potentially evade existing defenses.
Experts say the CCP could target naval ships and air bases in the Pacific, and that hypersonic missiles could reach their targets in minutes as opposed to conventional cruise missiles that take an hour or two to fly to them; this would be a huge concern.
Former U.S. officials and Western analysts also say that Chinese hypersonic missiles could one day target U.S. aircraft carriers or Taiwan.
The WaPo quoted former U.S. government officials as saying that the Trump administration was ready to blacklist Feiteng and some other Chinese companies from exporting late last year, but stopped because its term was up and there was no time to complete the process.
The latest ban on Chinese companies such as Feiteng, introduced by the Biden administration on Thursday, will stop the flow of U.S.-origin technology to those Chinese companies; it will also slow the advance of the Communist Party’s hypersonic weapons program, as well as other sophisticated weapons and more powerful surveillance capabilities.
Analysts say that the move is worth the sacrifice of commercial interests in a move that is expected to make adjustments in U.S. policy that will no longer allow U.S. technology to aid the Chinese Communist military and curb its future progress.
Taiwan’s dilemma wanders between legitimacy and profit
As relations between the United States and China become increasingly tense, the issue of appropriate restrictions on U.S. and Taiwanese companies doing business with China comes into play.
All of the chips in the Feiteng supercomputer used in Mianyang’s hypersonic weapon experiments are produced through Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing company TSMC. It is the largest of several Taiwanese chipmakers, and it makes chips for both civilian and military use.
Ou Sifu, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense Security Studies, a think tank co-founded by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, said that both the United States and China have simultaneously ended up using TSMC’s chips for military purposes.
For example, TSMC produces chips used in advanced U.S. weapons, including Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets. TSMC announced last year that it would build a $12 billion plant in Arizona in response to the Trump administration’s concerns about the security of the semiconductor supply chain.
“These private companies do business and don’t consider factors like national security.” Ou said Taiwan, as a small region, lacks the leverage and willingness to enact an export ban; it is relatively lax and has more loopholes than the relatively complete set of export controls and regulations in the United States.
On the other hand, Taiwanese companies are in a dilemma. Taiwan is an autonomous liberal democracy that relies on Washington to defend itself from Beijing’s invasion on the one hand, and on the other hand relies on the Chinese market, which accounts for 35 percent of Taiwan’s trade volume.
In an email to the WaPo, TSMC said it complies with all laws and export controls. TSMC may have to distance itself from Feiteng after it is blacklisted; but because China is the largest semiconductor market, it is unlikely that TSMC will give up its China business when the law allows, as that would be unaccountable to shareholders.
Alchip, another Taiwanese company that works with Feiteng, said its agreement with Feiteng stipulates that its chips are not to be used for military purposes.
But a press release issued by Alchip in 2018 also described their work with “China’s National Supercomputing Center,” which at the time had been blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce for more than three years for its involvement in nuclear explosive activities.
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