I think there’s a realistic chance that China could simply leapfrog the west by developing an alternative computing substrate. We’re basically reaching the limits of what’s possible with silicon at this point, and you have to spend incredible amounts of effort to squeeze out increasingly meagre performance gains. However, a substrate with different physical properties has potential of being an order of magnitude faster even using a naive approach leaving lots of room for further optimization. This would be the equivalent of going from vacuum tubes to transistors.

There are a few other approaches such as carbon based semiconductors, carbon nanotubes, and graphene based semiconductors that China is actively researching. It’s only a matter of time until one of these gets to the point where it can be commercialized. This approach in particular looks very promising where they actually managed to produce new 12-inch wafers that are just one atom thick with low production costs https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/na/d0na01043j

This kind of tech could end up being commercialized within a decade, and it would make silicon obsolete.