“I read a novel like this about 10 years ago. Can’t remember the title.”
I did, too. I can’t remember the title, either. I think it was one of the Kindle books I read like eating M&Ms. The one I read had the premise that the Chicoms had put kill switches in millions of chips and simply sent the command to turn them all off.
Tom Clancy did something similar in The Bear and the Dragon. Only it was a CIA agent planting a virus in a Chinese Politburo computer. (ironic.)
The novel Ghost Fleet, by Singer and Cole, had most current US military hardware compromised by Chinese chips. The chips were designed to shut down when they received a coded signal from the Chinese at a particular microwave frequency.