The Trump administration's decision to allow Nvidia's H200 AI chips to be sold to China, while taking 25 percent of the sales revenue for the US government, is not a goodwill gesture but a calculated adjustment. Two years of tight export controls have failed to slow China's AI progress; instead, they have pushed Chinese firms to speed up work on homegrown chips and a full tech stack, raising the risk that US companies could lose the world’s second-largest AI market and their influence there. For China, the twists from bans to partial approvals only confirm that the path of self-reliant development in core technologies is the right one: only by keeping key technologies and development capacity firmly in its own hands can it retain real strategic options, whatever happens in the external environment.