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by guai888 2014 days ago
China is weak in semiconductor industry and they simply do not have the capability to overcome the obstacle in 5 to 10 years or maybe never. Let me give two examples of obstacle. US has monopoly in the software tools that engineer use to design IC. Japan has the chemical that semiconductor fab foundry need to make IC. US now has slapped sanction on China's top fab foundry SMIC with intention to kill China's semiconductor industry. China's semiconductor companies's stocks are dropping stone while Taiwan semiconductor companies's stock are rising like crazy so a lot people are pessimistic about semiconductor companies in China. Semiconductor is a very expensive game to play. China has big domestic market but it is not large enough to sustain a semiconductor business. This is very different from other industries.
3 comments

Only knowing HN comments about IC design tools, I got the impression that they don't seem to be that good. Which means that China could come out ahead because they can work with better tools if they make them by themselves.

And as far as I know, China is a huge supplier of chemicals for biological engineering. If they know that much about chemistry, is the gap still so big that they cannot transfer their knowledge?

WW2 resulted in diverting a substantial amount of resources to R&D and hence the explosion in innovation & science everything from Radar, automobiles, computing, nuclear energy, not to mention jet engine and computing.

Today China is on a one sided war of technology dominance while the rest of us are sleeping or bickering over patents & tech protectionism, anti competitiveness and blocking acquisition.

China has the scale, money, leadership and capability to pool resources on a literal war footing to develop what it can not buy. Let us not fool ourselves.

It's worth noting that the Chinese state is able to pool resources and direct a national effort in a way countries like Japan and the U.S. are not. It may take longer than 10 years but they'll get there.
The bureaucracy in China is insanely crazy. I doubt that they have passion to wait longer than 3 years. Not to mention 10 years.