[dirtyid]

>i don't think one country can do it all by itself

Decades ago US basically wholey dominated semi and it was strategic lapse in judgement that industry has globalized so much, away from US control, something they're looking to regain and technically could if semi wasn't so entangled into US east asian security architecture. Current western semi industry is basically US+JP+DE+NL+SKR+TW. Aggregated effort of ~700M, where US is half that. And in US it's not well compensated job where industry had/has first dibs on talent. Nor extremely high industrial policy except in East Asia, but in general it hasn't gotten strategic priority until recently.

At the end of the day, PRC large enough that talent generation can match/exceed in terms of quantity. In terms of talent quality, TW, SKR, JP all have rote education which was still enough for them excel in different aspects of the supply chain, from equipment, to production, to inputs. Meanwhile even Chaebol and Zaibatsu culture was enough to produce absolute electronic giants. How much of Steve Job's vision was built by East Asian talent? Statistics alone will create outlier Steve Jobs, the hard part is building large pool of technical talent. Looking at current trends PRC pretty much only actor on trend to address semi/IC industry shortage by end of decade (most countries above projected to 100-300k shortage). PRC currently pumping about 30k IC graduates a year, still 200k short, 520k/720k out of # of IC talent 2018 white paper identified PRC would need for complete indigenous supply chain. Semi is a hard and large sector (like aviation), but (IMO) "do it yourself" is likely viable with talent base and proper industrial/talent policy. For reference US aerospace has about 700k jobs. They're currently the only major "do it yourself" aerospace power - they have the bodies to do it all essentially indigenously, vs next competitor, EU who has to work as a bloc.