With China, the issue isn't really the quality of the product. It's the geopolitical issues.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and other countries even Philippines and Vietnam don't want to depend too much on China. A lot of island disputes and so on and so forth.

My guess right now is that China will never catch up because Europe, US, Australia, and many other developing countries will avoid depending on China critically. This doesn't mean 0% would buy from China but it'll never become a critical dependency.

It's a real shame that the U.S is alienating it's allies through aggressive economic policy. Maybe we'll find ourselves on the wrong side of that economically resilient policy.

> My guess right now is that China will never catch up because [..]

The problem China is big enough to catch up just by it depending on itself + some cheap mass consumer market outlets to even further scale production.

Like they have 1408 Million people ~3times the US and their education system tries (at least of paper) to give everyone a chance to reach silence excellence iff (and only iff) they are noticeable above average (but also due to the form of their education system for people which certain kinds of approaches to thinking which is a major handicap they gave themself accidentally). Like either way with that population size, priority on catching up on chip production, willingness to steal science (through it's not like the US doesn't have a habit for that, too) it's just a matter of time until they have some truly genius people put into the right kind of position with the right kind of resources which will close the gap step by step.

The problem for America is, it's no longer dependable either...so it's not just , do we get the chips for 20% cheaper or not.

Oh they will catch up as TSMC amd Samsung are running out of steam and Intel is imploding. There's nothing better than motivating China to take on this monumental effort than thd tariffs and export controls.