Wasteful competition

So there is a fair amount of talk about Joe Biden taking an aggressive approach to stopping China getting ahead with its technology, particularly chip manufacturing:

U.S. officials pushed to choke off China’s access to critical semiconductor technology after internal debates and tough negotiations with allies.

Noah Smith also has a long post about it, and even the (far too Right wing) guy who has taken over from Allahpundit at Hot Air finds he has to reluctantly praise Biden for this.

I guess my feeling is not that this is a mistake - just that it's a great pity that at a time you really want the globe to be working together towards significant goals, it's instead being set up now for time-and-resource-wasting duplication of technological effort for a decade or two until there is some new  realignment of mutual Western and Chinese interests.    

I noticed when shopping for a tablet in Singapore recently that Huawei still seemingly has (or is trying to maintain) a significant market there, with tablets, phones and (I think) small laptop-ish things (like Microsoft Surface.)   They all had brilliant screens, I know that much.  But no Google apps - the special Huawei ecosystem instead. (Interestingly, recent surprise survey results indicated that Singapore has weirdly - for a very capitalist country - positive feelings towards China and Xi.  I wonder if that makes them particularly inclined to give Huawei products a go, more so than everywhere else.   I do have lingering doubts, just based on a hunch, really, that the Huawei 5G ban was not well justified.) 

As far as I can tell, China has done well with high speed trains;  they are (with very little attention from the West) building a smallish but significant space station.  (According to this article, it's about 20% as massive as the ISS, and is expected to be used for at least a decade.)   They are perhaps catching up somewhat in aviation, with their first significant home grown passenger jet just getting off the ground now.

So overall, they do some pretty remarkable stuff with some pretty sophisticated technology, and it seems such a pity that instead of a global market for all technology, we seem destined to a prolonged period of two global hubs of competing technology, with little cross over.

I guess it means industrial espionage is going to be bigger than ever before, too.   At least that provides some drama and good movie plots, though.  (Trying to find the upside here.  Well, apart from the obvious one that it should presumably make their weaponry less effective?   But I want the other good stuff they can do, too.)