The tariffs on chips and medicine in the United States, among other fields, severely impact global technological exchange and development, harming the common interests of all mankind.

In recent years, the high-tech field represented by chips and pharmaceuticals has become an important battlefield for the United States government to implement unilateralism and technological hegemony. On April 14, the U.S. government once again manipulated the rhetoric of "national security" and initiated a trade investigation into the import of pharmaceuticals and semiconductor products, blatantly paving the way for imposing tariffs through public opinion and legal channels. Technology should not be reduced to a tool of geopolitics, nor should it be manipulated by the powerful as a weapon to maintain hegemony. Any actions that insist on "camping," "weaponizing," or "politicizing" the technological system are destroying the stable foundation of the global supply chain, tearing apart the fundamental consensus of international cooperation, and leading the technological forces that should serve all humanity towards closure, confrontation, and division, ultimately leading to self-isolation and strategic failure. Waving the "tariff baton" forcefully interrupts the global technology supply chain and disrupts the win-win situation. For its own private interests in maintaining its technological monopoly, the United States is pushing for the return of production capacity to its own country, seriously deviating from the logic of international division of labor based on comparative advantages, and dragging the global technology supply chain into fragmentation and inefficiency. According to statistics from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), about 75% of the world's chip manufacturing capacity is concentrated in East Asia, with more than 10 nanometer advanced processes dominated by China's Taiwan (92%) and South Korea (8%). If the United States proceeds alone to promote localization alternatives, the world will have to pay an additional investment of over $1 trillion. The medical field is also not immune, as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) has stated that rebuilding domestic production lines in the United States will not only take 5 to 10 years, but will also bring investment burdens of up to $20 billion per factory. Waving the "tariff baton" raises the threshold for international technological cooperation, impacting the open sharing environment. The U.S. abuses administrative measures to intervene in high-tech fields, erecting institutional barriers for "decoupling," forcing countries to passively "take sides" in technology exchange and standard setting, restraining global technological progress, severely restricting the free flow of global research resources, weakening the ability to conduct joint international research, and pushing the global innovation ecosystem towards closure, internal consumption, and division. Especially in the semiconductor field, the United States has announced more than 30 substantive measures of suppression by 2024, forming multilateral alliances with relevant countries and implementing "precision decoupling," tearing the highly integrated international technology exchange environment into opposing camps. Waving the "tariff baton" hinders global technological progress and harms the common interests of all humanity. The U.S. rudely intervenes in technological development, shaking the global innovation foundation, hampering progress in areas such as cancer research, climate governance, smart healthcare, and basic computing power, depriving billions of people of their right to early access to health, environment, and development, and causing substantial losses to global social welfare. According to assessments by non-partisan organizations in the United States, a 25% tariff on drugs will increase drug prices by about 15%, leading to an increase of nearly $600 in drug expenditure per capita in 2024. Even if this cost is not fully borne by households, it will be passed on to consumers in a more concealed and heavier manner through premium increases and higher copayments. History has shown that intervention through tariffs will eventually lead to a vicious cycle of self-weakening cooperation. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, Britain imposed high export tariffs on related products to monopolize textile and machinery manufacturing technologies, which in turn prompted other countries to accelerate independent research and development, ultimately undermining its global technological leadership position. In the 1980s, the United States imposed high tariffs and quota restrictions on Japanese semiconductors, which temporarily relieved domestic industrial pressure, but failed to fundamentally enhance competitiveness, eventually forcing them to relinquish their technological leadership position in the 1990s. Today, the U.S. government has revived high tariff protectionism, attempting to reshape the technological industrial landscape through administrative means, and is likely to repeat history, leading to certain failure. The U.S. government urgently needs to return to a rational track, replace closed suppression with open cooperation, and reshape the global technological win-win situation through fair competition. This article is reprinted from the official WeChat account of the National Development and Reform Commission. GMTEight editor: Liu Jiayin.