Ditto for Allwinner and other Chinese ARM licensees. They buy the majority of IP blocks from ARM and perhaps a HDMI PHY & WiFi chip from some small company (also not Chinese) cause its cheaper, send the mostly vanilla design to TSMC, and when it doesn't work immediately run back to ARM asking them to fix it (which they do).

Apple & Qualcomm comparatively tweak or redesign most of the IP they license from ARM, which is what gives them such a significant performance advantage over the 300 other ARM licensees.

Another example of this is AMD's recent JV in China, essentially passing a holding company the IP to build an original Zen core. While this is sketchy AF, I think we can expect brutal embargoes if China attempts to sell these chips outside their domestic market, and despite having a year and a half to improve Zen, it appears Dhyana is nearly identical to Zen.

Meanwhile Zen 2 has already started sampling in useful quantities on a newer process node that Chinese foundries likely won't replicate anytime soon, seeing as Global Foundries gave up, Intel is running years behind and massively over budget, with TSMC having the only working sub-14nm process. Even if AMD licenses this architecture, it will take years (even with process theft from TSMC) to make those chips on 7nm in China.

Excellent post but once China subsumes Taiwan - and that day is coming - they'll have TSMC's technology and that much more electronics production monopolistic leverage.

China won't be subsuming Taiwan anytime soon. If China did subsume Taiwan, TSMC would lose some of their process engineers, and this is apt to have disastrous consequences for their sub-14nm nodes as they are so finicky to get & keep working reliably.

The population replacement in Hongkong that's at its another height, will inevitably occur in Taiwan if that starts to be a remote reality, albeit at an even larger scale.

China doesn't have exclusive control of the borders with Taiwan, for population replacement (or just flooding Taiwan with loyal Chinese citizens to alter the demographics) it would require the Taiwanese government to look the other way, or encourage it. Neither is likely to happen, as their government isn't asleep at the helm.