Has China obtained the world’s most important machine?
Its Dutch manufacturer is fighting to rebut American claims.
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The US has since 2019 blocked the export to China of the extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, lithography machines that make the world’s most advanced semiconductors.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Economist
The Dutch punch above their weight in technology transfers that shaped the modern world.
In the 17th century, their financial and farming innovations spread to Britain, laying the ground for the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire’s expansion. Peter the Great, a Russian czar, studied Dutch shipbuilding techniques to build the navy that established Russia as a maritime power in the 18th century. And in the 1970s, a Pakistani scientist, A.Q. Khan, stole blueprints from a Dutch laboratory to launch his country’s nuclear weapons programme and seed similar efforts in North Korea, Iran and Libya.
