Quality
The output is not everything. Many Chinese chip clones barely meet specs and fail often.
Given how they buy up chips and stockpile (learning from diamond traders), I wouldn't hold my breath...
China has reported dramatic increase in local production of semiconductors and other electronics. The nation's Bureau of Statistics published data on industrial production during July '21. Integrated circuit production rose 41.3 per cent year-on-year, to over 31 billion units. For the calendar year to date, IC production …
In my personal experience, chinese-made chips are inferior, both in design and manufacturing, but each year, year after year, they're getting less inferior and more refined. Most "new" designs from them still have some problem or limitation, but less and less. For many, the difference simply doesn't matter anymore.
How much time until they're as good as any western chip or better?
(my experience revolves around MCUs, radio/cell modules and simple logic ICs)
my recent experience with a chip shortage (in which a Hong Kong chip dealer offered to sell them for over 20 times the normal price in very limited quanitities) on an otherwise popular (yet single-manufacturer) device that had good world wide supply at design time [my solution was to re-do the firmware to accommodate inverted-logic and save tens of thousands of dollars] suggests that China may pick winners and losers until they've completely cashed in on the disaster.
And last I checked, China was STILL a communist country.
seeing the chip making FINALLY recover though is still "good". But I hope the recovery is TOO LATE to stop manufacturers from building chip factories elsewhere.
your point about human rights failures is "not wrong" of course, but the method should be simpler: build competing factories elsewhere, i.e. no more "all eggs in China's basket".
In 2021 there are 2 additional reasons to do this. One, China has proven themselves to be an unreliable part of the supply chain. Two, the manner in which they (the CCP) just "shut things down" without warning, damn the consequences. The combination of the two suggests they can't be trusted.
(other places in the world exist where tech investment is likely to pay off BETTER)