Reverse engineering might not take 20 years, but what will take a long time is creating an education system that can produce a trained workforce, build factories, create energy infrastructure needed to run them, and so on. US industrial economy right now is comparable in size to Russia. Chinese industrial economy is an order of magnitude larger. China also graduates more engineers and scientists than US does, and has surpassed the US in terms of quantity and quality of scientific papers. The gap will only keep growing over time because China has a much bigger population who are provided with much better education.
While this is great news and all, does it really take 20 years to reverse engineer this stuff?
Reverse engineering might not take 20 years, but what will take a long time is creating an education system that can produce a trained workforce, build factories, create energy infrastructure needed to run them, and so on. US industrial economy right now is comparable in size to Russia. Chinese industrial economy is an order of magnitude larger. China also graduates more engineers and scientists than US does, and has surpassed the US in terms of quantity and quality of scientific papers. The gap will only keep growing over time because China has a much bigger population who are provided with much better education.