Comment by novia

> What the superior performance of his machine mainly due to the Western components he was using?

No. The genius was in the design and how the components were used.

> It seems entirely legitimate to me for the Communists to have favored a more secure supply chain.

It mentions in the article that the bottleneck with getting components that were high quality was that the local government did not want to spend the money to develop their own secure supply chain.

He demonstrated a proof of concept. If they were concerned about national security, they could have made it a priority to get him equivalent components.