Economical and performant chip and jet turbine production are two areas where China can't really take any shortcuts. They have to put in a lot of time and resources to rediscover closely guarded secrets that are almost impossible to reverse engineer. They are dumping in the resources, so I'm sure they will eventually get there, but it might be a few decades (in both fields, they can already do performant or economica…
My favorite story about this is a paint manufacturer building a brand new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility to increase their capacity. Everything was controlled, monitored, etc. to the nth degree.
Only one problem--paint from the new line no longer stuck to anything.
Cue a crash debugging with all hands on deck. The problem? The new line was too clean.
Paint relies on the correct ends attaching to the wall and then the other ends forming a kind of network to protect those. But there is a tradeoff--the outer paint surface (exposed to elements) vs the inner paint surface (attaches to the wall) have different needs. If you make the inner paint surface too dense (molecules all vertical) the paints sticks great, but then doesn't protect against the elements. If you make the outer paint surface dense (molecules all horizontal) then the paint protects well, but then won't stick to the wall.
The solution: add some "dirt". Adding some very fine, very small inert particles can change the angle that the paint molecules connect and fix the adhesion issues.
The lesson: nobody knows all the things necessary to run a manufacturing line. Ever.