Give them enough time and they will. EUV will hit limits anyway in a decade.

For china it's DUV+packaging for now, NIL/DSA mid-term, and MoS₂/2D chips long term. But wafer scale, defect free 2D logic is 20–30 yrs out, so no EUV shortcut anytime soon

Thanks to a combination of espionage and homegrown Chinese technology advancements, they went from "decades behind" to "years behind" quite rapidly on several critical parts of the chip manufacturing process.

China isn't quite there yet, but they will catch up. The question then becomes whether China can surpass the west or if they're stuck in lock-step behind us.

Yeah but China wasn't (and won't be) given the tech. The fastest path for Apple would be to get POTUS a gold iPad in exchange for the US removing exclusivity terms for the EUV tech they gave ASML.

And SMIC is a decade or less behind without any of that.