So regarding western news and information on the Chinese semiconductor industry, why does it seem like the MMS, experts or even the top level politicians seem to have no idea what going on? There's probably dozens of articles a week, various experts giving interviews/podcasts/writing articles and so much focus on the semiconductor industry and they miss out on some very public information.
One example would be SMIC's 7nm process. SMIC themselves have said publicly that 7nm is achievable and in their roadmap said that they would make a 7nm chip in 2020/2021, all this public info since 2018. And it wasn't totally lost in western media, there was a bunch of Seeking Alpha articles about SMIC's N+2 years before 2022. And yet there was this big explosion of news once Techinsights actually confirmed that SMIC managed to fab a 7nm transistor. Western media was so shocked, dozens upon dozens of articles.
Even the experts didn't see it coming. Hell, even the highest level of government in Washington seemed to have been blindsighted, judging by some of their comments. Probably not a coincidence that weeks after the Techinsights article about SMIC's 7nm was out, America set out on sanctions on DUVi machines and more sanctions on high and medium end semiconductors.
2nd example would be EUV. If you search for China's progress on EUV, you will find many articles that just state how impossible it would be for China to develop their EUV machine, how complex ASML's EUV is, the tin droplets, mirrors/lenses that china can't make in a million years and maybe some minor progress updates like Huawei's recent EUV patents. There's a few articles that even state that SMEE will be the ones developing EUV, which is false. Not much more info after that.
And then there's SSMB EUV. There's zero. Literally zero(0), no news, or clickbait youtube videos on China's SSMB project. Not even a single Seeking Alpha article about it. It's not a big secret, Tsinghua university has a English page on their website will all the info that you need, they worked with western scientist on the concept before, this site can't seem to stop talking about it, there's chinese studies/papers on nature on SSMB EUV, there's news on weibo about it. Hell the thing already started construction and nobody in the West seems to know about it. At this rate, the thing will be built and pumping out chips for a year before anyone in the West finds out.
Really makes you wonder how much this "experts" know about the chinese semiconductor news, what kind of research they're doing. What are the Journalist doing? You would think that someone would love to break open the floodgates on this new potential national security threat, maybe make some big clickbait youtube video about it.
The real question is how much do American politicians and intelligence agencies really know about the cutting edge in the chinese semiconductor space? Surely they must have some idea, more than us, but again, their reaction to SMIC's N+2 seems like they got blindsighted and I really don't see people like DeSantis not writing some long tweet or blog about "China's race to EUV and why you should be super scared of it and why it will destroy America and freedom" if they knew anything about it.