Washington’s efforts to block China’s access to high-end technology homed in on just two places outside the US: Tokyo and Eindhoven.

The small, low-rise Dutch city, whose historic core was obliterated during the second world war, is home to ASML, which produces the world’s most advanced silicon chipmaking machines. These make the semiconductors used in everything from smartphones to missiles.

Eindhoven’s tech sector has attracted EU commissioners, who routinely visit in an effort to understand how a place hit by industrial decline in the early 1990s transformed into a regional tiger economy, expanding by 8 per cent annually. Its companies and academics file almost 500 patents per 100,000 inhabitants annually, one of the highest rates in the world. And a quarter of Dutch private sector research and development, €3bn a year, is spent here.