“No R&D, No Subsidy: What Indian Industrial Policy Can Learn From China”, Swarajya, June 24, 2026

“In November 2020, an ASML deep-ultraviolet lithography machine, a device costing upwards of $70 million, arrived at a half-built chip fabrication plant in the Wuhan suburb of Linkong.

The plant belonged to Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (HSMC), whose chief executive had an elementary-school education and whose advertised plan was to produce 7-nanometre chips, the most advanced node then made anywhere outside Taiwan and South Korea.

Within four weeks of taking delivery, HSMC’s founders had mortgaged the machine to a bank for 580 million yuan. By the following March the project was bankrupt, and its employees — told the day before to expect a workplace barbecue — were dismissed by group WeChat message. Twenty billion dollars of nominal investment, much of it from provincial vehicles and state-backed lenders, had vanished into a pit in central China…….”

Read full article at swarajyamag.com