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by Sammi 134 days ago
You speak like the Chinese catching up with the technology is inevitable. The Chinese aren't behind in semiconductor and airplane technology for lack of trying. They are constantly trying to catch up to a moving goal post.

There is an established playbook that the Chinese have used for decades when taking over an industrial sector from other countries. They funnel vast amounts of state funding into it, sell at or below cost for decades, win the low end market, and then slowly and gradually move up the technology chain. It's worked for almost everything, but it's this last part that just isn't working for them with semiconductors and aviation. They aren't capable of catching up fast enough in these two fields. These are sectors that are both too large for any one country to do well on their own. Even for someone as large as China. It requires a global supply chain.

1 comments

PRC generating as much STEM/skilled talent than OECD combined... that's enough for entire semi supply chain and 2 civil aviation companies.

Aviation is functionally caught up, as in if PRC wants to throw together a narrow or wide body on domestic components short term, they can at scale and service domestic market with less fuel efficiently. The primary reason COMAC uses western components is for faster global certification.

PRC Semi progress beating western analysts of catchup, instead of 10 years to EUV they're looking ~7/8 years. Again global semi supply chain is just a handful of countries with fraction population as PRC. And all western semi players projected to have talent shortage in the 100,000s, so that moving goal post likely going to move slower and slower vs PRC convergence.

Semi easier medium/long term problem since PRC _only_ country projected without semi talent shortage, i.e. current trends and forces point to inevitable convergence and PRC.

Ironically aviation harder problem because exporting outside of PRC market is matter of geopolitics vs pure technical/state capacity.

Looking at trend lines, west simply not capable of staying ahead.