During the cold war, the US employed export restrictions to keep the latest CPU technology from reaching the USSR. Why? Because we knew that the technology could be used to speed up the development of war technologies: fighters and bombers, nuclear weapons and ICBMs, submarines, and communications equipment. For decades, the U.S. also instituted a policy of requiring certain military components to be made entirely in the US. This policy was intended to avoid both the capture of designs by foreign adversaries, and the inability to produce a piece of war technology due to the producer being an adversary.
People have grown accustomed to peace. A few local skirmishes and a couple of Iraq events notwithstanding, the world has known greater peace over the last several decades than is typical (my apologies to residents of those skirmish locations for making light of your plight).
That said, China has demonstrated to me one capability that to this very day exceeds the capabilities of most democratic nations. They look ahead 10, 20, even 50 years, and then they plan ahead. In the U.S., we are lucky if we manage to plan ahead 4 years. One example of this is population management: the Chinese realized that population growth would very quickly lead to their downfall. Unlike India, they did something effective about it. While I do not condone some of their methods, I do applaud their willingness to recognize that the unchecked growth of their population would ultimately lead to the demise of the strength of their nation, and an intolerable reduction in the quality of life for its citizens. To this day, the U.S. government is still too shortsighted to address this problem, instead preferring to let "the next guy" deal with it.
China knows that worldwide population demands will soon lead to insurmountable shortages of food, fuel, and water. The U.S. knows this too, but politicians don't get elected by bad news... so the information is not handled responsibly and used to effect the changes that are so essential to stem the resulting hardships.
What happens when several powerful nation-states are all competing for the same limited resources, and the very lives of their constituents are at stake? War.
I suspect that China sees this, and is taking steps to ensure that when it happens they will continue to be able to produce all of their goods - both for peace and for war. And if by some unlikely twist of fate a war doesn't happen, then, well, they will at least own the semiconductor industry. Intel's massive annual R&D budget is a small pittance compared to the annual trade deficit the U.S. has with China. All China has to do is use part of that to hire out knowledgeable CPU architects - or pay them to spy - and they can get up to speed on the latest CPU technologies very quickly. Next, they buy the latest IC manufacturing technology from TSMC or similar. Then they hunker down and start to build a modern fab plant while they develop a core R&D team to advance their CPU and fab technologies over time. They can initially make CPUs and/or GPUs for companies that outsource the fab work (AMD, anyone?). Then, they can move on to fab'ing their own chips when their designs are ready. With enough impetus, they could do all of this in 10 years. It will take them longer than Intel to make their first couple of plants and architectures because they will have to learn those processes along the way. But eventually they will hit a rhythm, and along the way they will inject stolen technologies from the West to keep them as close to leading edge as they can be. So 20 years sounds feasible barring the introduction of a new technology such as nanotube-based circuits.
That's a bit longer than I intended, but I think the world is going to end up as sharecroppers to the Chinese if we don't recognize the trends.
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