Semiconductor industry to overcome challenges

"But faced with widened restrictions by the US, they feel an urgent need to work with Chinese semiconductor companies. By serving such tech heavyweights, Chinese chip companies have the chance to become global players," Huang said.

He added that in 2021 alone, the mainland imported chips worth more than $400 billion.

John Lee, a consultant for International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think tank, said, "China is becoming a major player in the globalized chip value chain, a trend that US-led efforts are unlikely to derail."

Li Xianjun, an associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Industrial Economics, said China's semiconductor industry has seen robust growth in recent years.

According to the CSIA, sales revenue for China's integrated circuit industry exceeded 1 trillion yuan for the first time in 2021, with year-on-year growth of 18 percent. In 2017, the industry's sales revenue stood at about 540 billion yuan.

For the first time, three mainland chipmakers accounted for more than 10 percent of the global foundry revenue in the first quarter of last year, according to Trend-Force, a market research and intelligence provider. Foundry is industry parlance for contract chip manufacturing.

According to data compiled by Bloomberg in June, Chinese chip companies are also growing faster. In the past four quarters, 19 of the world's 20 fastest-growing chip industry companies were based in China, compared with just eight the previous year.

In addition, more promising startups are emerging. As of November, there were 50 semiconductor unicorns, or startups worth more than $1 billion, in China. Their total valuation was 858.4 billion yuan, according to New Fortune, a financial services platform.

Of these companies, 25 are chip designers, eight specialize in general processing units, and five are auto chip companies, New Fortune said.

Unicorns have also emerged in semiconductor materials, chipmaking equipment and electronically designed automation tools, with the aim of narrowing the gap between China and the US in these areas, New Fortune added.