Beijing orders all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign PC equipment and software within three years, allowing only Chinese-made tech
Yuan Yang and Nian Liu — Beijing has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign computer equipment …
Australian Financial Review
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 directive is the formal escalation of a campaign Bloomberg had already flagged in China's 2014 plan to purge foreign technology from government procurement — five years later it becomes a hard deadline covering every government office and public institution.
Foreign hardware and software vendors serving Chinese government accounts — Intel, AMD, Microsoft among those later named in follow-on orders — face a shrinking installed base as offices replace equipment on a three-year clock, while domestic PC and OS makers gain captive demand.
Second-order effects
The mandate spreads beyond offices: by 2022 state-backed companies were ordered onto the same domestic-PC track, and in 2023 central-government officials were told not to use foreign-branded phones like iPhones for work or bring them into the office.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds through its endpoints — the 2024 guidelines taking effect and the 2026 order to uninstall a government-tailored Windows 10 ahead of its February 2027 retirement — China's public sector converges on fully sovereign hardware and operating systems, structurally walling off that market from US vendors.
The trend: Chinese government IT is moving from ad-hoc substitution toward total sovereign-stack replacement, with each successive order extending the purge deeper into the state apparatus.
This has nothing to do with decoupling obviously and is similar to Buy American Act. But certain to roil relations with EU which wanted to open Chinese public procurement, not close it further https://www.ft.com/...
China tells government offices to remove all foreign computer equipment Directive is likely to be a blow to US multinational companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
Beijing's been pushing in this direction for a long time, but this is the first time it's laid down orders to govt agencies with measurable targets. The goal is clear: to lessen the harm of future US sanctions, says @pstAsiatech. Our @FT scoop https://www.ft.com/...
🚨 $SPX Beijing orders all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign PC equipment and software within three years, allowing only Chinese-made tech via @Techmeme - My take: * China may fall further behind * Chips may be OK * A lot of unknowns = not good news
Probably bullish for Semis & bearish for software including $MSFT. Either way it's a win as China wont be able to keep up with Western technology development if they shun all western OS & eventually hardware. https://www.ft.com/...
Back in May, Beijing ordered its military to look into creating a homegrown OS to replace Windows, fearing its military was vulnerable to US hacking See here: https://www.zdnet.com/... Add the Huawei-5G scandals and the US trade tensions on top and you get: https://twitter.com/..…
The market's attention is all on deal or no deal. But there should be no doubt that China maintains a host of discriminatory policies. I have long thought “buy Chinese” import substitution policies should be a bigger U.S. priority for example. https://www.ft.com/...
Beijing orders gov't agencies to replace foreign PCs and software: No surprise with Trump's toxic trade war. And, given the grey area of SOEs and PRC private sector the impact may be quite broad. A step backward. Exc piece @yuanfenyang Nian Liu @ftchina https://www.ft.com/...