China already has the EUV know-how they need.
I'll tell you why.
IMEC has this tech, and Belgian universities are overflowing with Chinese students. I studied there and I was one of the few non-Chinese doing electro engineering.
IMEC is right next to the University. Most of the technology about EUV is from IMEC. Those first ASML EUV machines, they didn't go to Intel or Samsung, they went to IMEC to do research.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “Europe has 2 jewels. One is ASML, the most advanced lithography, and the other is IMEC, the most advanced semiconductor research in the world.”
To understand what ASML does, you need to understand what IMEC does. One can not exist without the other.
Intel understands this, but so does China. Huawei understand this. Huawei invites Belgian students to China, students that sometimes work at IMEC for post doctorates and have knowledge of EUV. It's one giant in and outflow of students.
The only way this could be possibly stopped is if governments stop the mass inflow of Chinese students at universities. But universities make lots of money from foreign students, so I don't see that happening.
I actually addressed this issue with a professor when I was at uni, who worked at IMEC too, but I was pretty much brushed aside as having "racist undertones" for questioning the amount of Chinese students at the campus having easy access to IMEC's developments, who then went back to China after their studies.
Belgian news today:
Belgian news 2019:
What you describe as far as the number of Chinese students has been the case at least since the 1990s, though probably not to the level it's at now.
When I was in school back then, I had a Chinese roommate. I was going for my BS in Comp Sci and he was going for his Masters. His undergrad degree was in 'Signal Analysis'. They do things differently in China's universities, at least back then. They would go from a very specific discipline at undergrad, to more generalization at doctoral. Western schools tend to go from generalization, to specialization.
Anyway, I had a number of conversations with him about this, because I had the same question then as people generally do now. With all these PHD engineers running around, why isn't China on top of tech?
His answer was interesting. Has to more to do with social structure, than availability of educated people with the correct skills.
It came down to this: China is very hierarchical. People in China with a PHD don't actually do much work. That is why they got a PHD in the first place, so they can be respected and boss other people around. Hence they never get any practical experience, they just tell others what to do, and they have little reason to change as individual accomplishment is rarely celebrated in China. This is a behavior that would never work in the west, because companies in competition need their best people working hard to be competitive, else the company fails. China's big tech companies tend to be state backed, so they will never fail.
Now, things may have changed in the intervening 25 years. I would imagine it has, since China is a pseudo-capitalistic system.
But this might help explain why they are so very slow at getting ahead, despite what would seem an insurmountable position of dominance on a qualification 'spec sheet' that just counts the number of graduates / higher degreed STEM engineers for the country as a whole. Especially given they've had that dominance for nearly 30 years now.
The system they operate in simply does not encourage people who can, to expend the effort to do.
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