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A New Era for the Chinese Semiconductor Industry: Beijing Responds to Export Controls
(americanaffairsjournal.org)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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It's going to turn out that a nation of billions can, surprisingly, figure out how to make chips domestically once it is no longer possible obtain them efficiently from external markets. This might take a few years to ramp up but it will happen and the market will be flooded.
Most people I've talked to on forums like this believe it is impossible for various reasons that center around technical competence.
I am no lover of Chinese governmental policies but this attitude is both racist and risky. I am old enough to remember people saying Japam was only good at copying Western inventions, for example. I also remember a few years later when everyone wanted to learn to speak Japanese and The Book of Five Rings was the hot CEO book of the month.
China will figure this out.
That is the opposite conclusion of this article you didn't read and it's extremely unlikely for many reasons.
China will eventually be able to compete in the mass semiconductor commercial market fort non-essential chips, but are about as far away from today's advanced chip manufacturing as your '99 iMac is from the Oculus Rift.
If the sanctions remain in place and are effective, the only way China will catch up is to develop an entirely new manufacturing process(which they are trying to do, blindly) as well as develop comparable physical fab technology to tsmc(which at their current tech is like trying to build a pixel 9 from scratch with hands tools).
Anecdotes from forum users can be entertaining but are not indicative of anyone who knows anything about the industry, and this article explains very clearly why the market will change but China is facing near to completely insurmountable challenges when it comes to competing in the advanced semiconductor market.
Taiwan, the only country that could help china with this, is strongly opposed to China on most fronts, direly opposed to helping China technologically since that would mitigate Taiwan's leverage, and has allied themselves with the most powerful and technologically advanced country in the world(outside of semiconductors; smooth move Taiwan), another opponent of China based on their national security, on which the states spends obscenely more money and resources on then anyone else.
"Well china could take over taiwan our they did Hong Kong."
In which case, tsmc would physically destroy their fabs and data, China would gain nothing and lose any goodwill they've been cultivating and spending billions on, with more sanctions than before and end up even further behind than they already are.
The distance China is late to the chip game and the extreme technological limits of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacture are not racist and it's nonsensical of you to imply they are.
It's not impossible that the Chinese could catch up eventually, and they have plenty of resources to try, but manufacturing advanced semiconductors without knowledge, resources and access is not an obstacle to be overcome like the Japanese refining manufacturing methods for mainstream global technologies and factory management strategies, this is more like trying to throw a dart without any hands or feet from your apartment to a dart board in another country, and then the dart changes into a butterfly, lands on a flower, pollinates it and the flower turns into a baboon that composes sonnets.
This is a very different take from "Chinese people just can't do this no matter how much time, money, and talent they devote to it" which is what I'm taking about.
Yes, mine is a different, or accurately, a more comprehensive take.
I do address your quoted concern here briefly in the second paragraph of my earlier comment.
"China will eventually be able to compete in the mass semiconductor commercial market fort non-essential chips, but are about as far away from today's advanced chip manufacturing as your '99 iMac is from the Oculus Rift."
Maybe even as far away as a calculator is from the rift.
Chinese chutzpah isn't as important here as the actual technological gaps and rarity of the software processes and absolutely globally unique fabs of tsmc.
It's not a matter of wanting it, the practical, actual limitations of the endeavor mean something severely phenomenal, miraculous or devastating is going to have to happen for the Chinese to close any sort of chip gap in the "few years" you predict.
A lot can happen in ten years these days. For some reason I always have to state this every time this topic comes up: I never said it was going to be easy. It's not going to be fast. It is going to happen, though.
Changing your assessment from "a few years" to "ten years" makes it more likely China could catch up, sure, and is very different from what you originally said.
I haven't made the claim you think it's easy, I said that the technical challenges the Chinese are facing developing new chip technologies are not at all the same challenges as your example of Japanese developing better methods for manufacturing common global products.
Reorganizing the company error-reporting structure, like Japan did with Toyota, is not going to help China develop advanced chips.
Modern chipmaking is a task orders of magnitude more difficult working with technologies orders of magnitude smaller, with a minute and unique knowledge and manufacturing base aware of Chinese corporate statecraft and committed to not leaking their newest processes. Those sources also have the best research teams and research development technology globally.
The technology is not linear. They cannot continue making smaller chips following an iterative, logical process and throwing more man hours at it. If the sanctions remain effective and China is unable to pull off a stunning degree of corporate statecraft, they will have to come up with entirely new processes on the atomic scale.
"It is going to happen."
What is? China matching TSMC's current chipmaking capabilities, at which point TSMC will be years ahead again?
It conceivably could, in your new timeline of a decade rather than the few years you predicted earlier.
Must it? Not at all.
You have adequately demonstrated your knowledge. Ten years is not that long. It's happening. We should prepare for it, not deny the reality which is what most do.
"It's happening?"
If you mean that China is attempting to close the semiconductor manufacturing gap, that's correct.
If you mean that they are closing that gap, that's baseless.
There's no evidence that they are any closer to closing that gap in manufacturing advanced microchips even with the billions of dollars they've poured into the industry since before US sanctions began.
The forum users you were talking about may not be preparing for the Chinese investment in semiconductor infrastructure, but the u.s government has been for years.
We didn't invite TSMC to set up in Arizona because we wanted a cool company in our backyard. It's directly related to the imposed sanctions and the knowledge that China will attempt to close that gap.
Biden isn't investing tens of billions of dollars into chip manufacturing on a whim, it's a deliberate preemptive response to what has obviously been coming for a while with Taiwan refusing to integrate with China and holding such technological superiority over China.
You don't have go do nuts with the details, I read the same articles. I'm just saying this is in the process of happening and people are denying the reality in general.
Example: https://lemmy.world/comment/8043602
Example: there's a person in this thread insisting that Chinese people do not have a way to say "yes". It's... weird, to be charitable.
Based on your positions so far, it doesn't seem like your vague "this" is happening at all.
It isn't weird that Chinese languages don't have a word for "yes", different languages have different rules.
It's just as weird and normal that you don't use gendered nouns while writing English.
Guess what? You are both smarter and more knowledgeable. Have a great day.
I hope you have a great day too