With the conflict between the United States and China, which is already beginning to show signs of being indefinite, the Asian country has maneuvered in recent years towards greater technological independence from American giants. The journey here brings nothing new when we see that Linux is out there and such China it has the potential to equip itself with the necessary hardware, and this is exactly what it is trying to do, at least for the IT infrastructure of its public administration.

According to Bloomberg, a government led by Xi Jinpin would order government agencies and state-sponsored companies to replace foreign-branded computer equipment with others that can be kept entirely within their borders. The plan is to implement the plan in the next two years, and 50 million computers could be replaced in central government alone..

China’s intentions to achieve greater technological independence are far from new, but rather a recurring theme that usually appears in the media from time to time. For years, the country has not only been a cheap factory for Western brands, but it can also develop its own high-quality technology to face the United States, increasingly concerned about the loss of hegemony.

At the hardware level, major victims point to well-known brands such as Dell and HP local manufacturers such as Lenovo and Huawei could greatly benefit from this. at the software level Kingsoft and Standard Software could benefit at the expense of companies like Microsoft and Adobe. In fact, Chinese companies are already seeing growth in their shares in the local stock market in response to measures taken by the government.

At the operating system level the logical thing is that windows are eventually replaced by linux. On this front is Deepin, whose origins are in an Asian country and which, step by step, makes a hole in the rough landscape of Linux distributions, where it is not easy to stand out between the oversaturated offer (there are more than 300 distributions) and those few users. On the other hand, we have HarmonyOS, which was Huawei’s response to the US veto.

Technological independence maneuvers over the past decade have been answered by companies such as Microsoft and HP, which have traded in conjunction with Chinese government-supported companies to ensure deliveries to a good customer. And despite the government’s insistence, the locally developed technology ran into shortcomings that forced it to turn to foreign suppliers, exacerbated by the fact that Lenovo was unable to get rid of such ones as Intel and AMD.

It will be necessary to see how far the contract for the exchange of foreign equipment for another local origin really goes.because 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.