Chinese central governments and state organizations must replace all their foreign PCs with computers from Chinese manufacturers within two years, Bloomberg reports. With this, China would like to promote its computer manufacturers and better protect state security.
Central government offices and government-backed companies should according to Bloomberg sources move to PCs from local manufacturers such as Lenovo within two years. Within central government alone, there could be as many as 50 million PCs that need to be replaced. Today, HP and Dell are still major PC sellers in the country. Both sell more than Lenovo in China.
The Chinese government has had a policy of discouragement when it comes to using PCs from foreign manufacturers, but for a long time still had to use many foreign PCs. The hardware and software of Chinese manufacturers lagged behind that of foreign manufacturers for years, but now Chinese companies such as cloud company Inspur and Lenovo play a major role on the world stage, so China should now dare to take the step, the news agency writes. After the central governments, provincial governments should also switch within two years.
It is likely that only the manufacturers of PCs and software will be covered by the new policy, but not components such as processors yet. Also, certain organizations, such as media and security companies, could still buy advanced foreign PCs if they need it. In addition to the ban on foreign PCs, governments and organizations should only be allowed to use operating systems developed in China.
The decision to ban foreign PCs has several reasons, according to Bloomberg. First, China would be too dependent on American technology. That dependence became clear with the sanctions against, for example, Huawei, which prevented Huawei from using American technology. Second, there are concerns about the safety of using foreign devices.