Eight years ago, during my time as a Beijing correspondent, I interviewed Hu Angang, head of Tsinghua University's Institute for Contemporary China Studies and one of China's leading state-affiliated scholars. At the time, he was the most "hot" Chinese academic in Korea. A documentary on China's "technological rise" was drawing strong popularity on Korea's terrestrial broadcasting, and in it Hu emphasized China's remarkable great leap forward, proclaiming "Super China." In foreign documentaries analyzing China, he also explained the shift in China's standing as it grew into one of the Group of Two (G2) nations rivaling the United States.
The impression I got during the interview was that he was closer to a public relations specialist than a sharp economist. Asked about China's future outlook, he replied, "Within five years, China will leap to 1.5 times the level of the United States in advanced technology, and in 10 years it will grow to nearly twice that of the United States." He did not stop there. He boasted that China, in terms of purchasing power parity and comprehensive national power, had already surpassed the United States and would overtake it to become a superpower within a few years.
What became of the Super China thesis proclaimed by this scholar, who enjoyed the favor of the Xi Jinping leadership? The year 2020, which he had cited as the time China would rise to become the world's No. 1 superpower, was the year the United States and China finally signed their phase-one trade agreement. That January, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He visited the U.S. White House and signed a document committing China to purchase $200 billion worth of American products over the following two years. In exchange for the United States withdrawing additional tariffs on China, Beijing signed an agreement to sharply increase purchases of American products. China's confidence — its belief that it could overcome America's all-out offensive on the strength of its 1.4 billion-person domestic market and the Belt and Road Initiative that had extended into Central Asia and Africa — proved to be hubris. Hu Angang, the champion of Super China, was singled out as one of the chief culprits behind the U.S.-China trade conflict for his theoretically thin Chinese superpower thesis, and he subsequently disappeared from official public appearances.
Ironically, the U.S.-China phase-one trade agreement, reached after a tense standoff, fizzled out amid the COVID-19 pandemic that spread immediately after the two countries signed. China's imports of American soybeans plunged after COVID-19, and its imports of American crude oil returned to where they had been. Still, there was a result for the United States: it halted China's ambition to become a semiconductor manufacturing power and stopped its early sprint.
What brought Hu Angang's Super China thesis to mind was partly the renewed U.S. tariff pressure on China that resumed with Donald Trump's second term, but the bigger influence was the semiconductor super cycle fervor that has been heating up our stock market lately. Frankly, it is hard to deny that the biggest beneficiaries of the semiconductor technology controls on China launched by President Donald Trump — including export restrictions on advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment from the Netherlands' ASML — are not the United States but Korea and Taiwan. Watching the semiconductor sprint led by Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, China may lament that, were it not for Trump's advanced-technology sanctions on China, it would by now have become a menacing presence standing shoulder to shoulder with Korean and Taiwanese firms in the global semiconductor market.
China, which failed to achieve its semiconductor rise under U.S. pressure, is drawing up a scenario for a come-from-behind victory in the second half against the Trump administration through artificial intelligence (AI). That dream is heading in a markedly different direction from the Super China thesis proclaimed by Professor Hu. Unlike Super China, which was close to a political slogan, China's low-cost, high-efficiency AI models such as "DeepSeek" are leaping to a level on par with the United States. China is showing fearsome staying power not only in AI but also in semiconductors. Recently, Chinese information technology firm Huawei announced a plan to achieve a 1.4-nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) semiconductor fine process within a few years without EUV lithography equipment. What is notable is the shift in how the global market views these Chinese ambitions. Experts at home and abroad say that within a few years China will become a fearsome competitor to Korea in the semiconductor market.
Thanks to the memory super cycle, the KOSPI has become the stock market with the highest gain rate in the world this year. But among semiconductor experts at home and abroad, warnings are emerging that if Korea, intoxicated by the semiconductor boom, neglects preparations for the post-high bandwidth memory (HBM) era, it may invite a crisis upon itself. China's semiconductor and AI rise is now a threat signal close at hand. To fall into a semiconductor illusion and think the glory of the current memory super cycle will last forever is hubris. Korea must narrow the gap with global firms in AI and prepare another leap that goes beyond HBM in semiconductors.
