Government of China

Countering export controls with domestic semiconductor subsidy. It enters the corpus with the $70 billion chip subsidy package, the same-day counter to the US Pax Silica Initiative, followed by a Manhattan Project-style effort in Shenzhen to reverse-engineer EUV lithography and a policy of restricting domestic purchases to force reliance on local silicon. In the recursive-self-improvement strand it is context rather than actor: the silicon curtain that decides where the loop’s compute can be built.