My 2 cents, not an expert on semicon though:
Simply due to population size, Samsung of S Korea just can’t compete with the leading firms from the US, China, the EU and Japan in the long run.
Intel, or other world leading US high tech firms in general, enjoys a decisive systematic advantage over SMIC and most other top tech firms of China, namely the world’s largest and the most complete cross-discipline Value Chain . This makes it very hard for China to compete with at the top end.
By "value chain" I specifically mean the broad sense (in contrast to usual narrow sense industrial value chain) individual-centred innovation culture + well-funded R&D integrated into complete industrial value chain + supplemented by the relatively efficient (and the most powerful) financial machenism particularly WS investment banking and VC.
Under such a system, an innovative individual is proactively encouraged culturally and financially to come up with fresh ideas. And these ideas (not neccesarily even world-leading some times compared to their potential competitors in the rest of the world, e.g. Facebook, or Microsoft ), could be more easily discovered,nurished, and well-financed immediately by either locally-based VC or universities, before being recommended, assisted and adopted by local industry leaders and eventually propagated throughout the rest of the world being the next gen gold standard by both the local world-class industries and universities, valued and supported in int’l capital market by the most powerful financial force – WallStreet.
China currently is no match for this "killer app", if its current financial sector ( particularly investment banking and VC), deep and systematic integration of local universities & industries, and its party-dominated (instead of private industrialists-dominated) large companies are not up to the same, or even better, standard of efficiency.
That’s why we see most of ground-breaking innovations which eventually lead the world next gen industrial standards come from the West, particularly the US.
This then leads to the popular myth that “Westerners can innovate, and the Chinese lack genes of innovation but just copy”. It is not gene, but more the aforementioned system behind the scene that makes or breaks, let alone the fact the many who are mainly responsible for so-called “westerners innovations” are in fact “the Chinese” who happen to live in the West.
So on the topic, even though Huawei and ZTE show that it can be done to some extent in one area (i.e. telecom), without deep and thorough re-structuring of Chinese party-owned large industries and universities to become more “Huawei-alike” at least, China (e.g. SMIC etc) is unlikely to match, let alone surpass, most other key industrial sector leaders of the US, such as what Intel and ARM do in semicon, in the foreseeable future I am afraid, simply because the US is bound to constantly generate the next “Steven Jobs” systematically, while the relatively inefficient Chinese system is bound to bury, or at least drag the legs of, the next “Chinese Steven Jobs” systematically .
In order to compete with the US on key tech, China must change.
