When you say they "should have 7nm in a year or two," are you just banking on them copying or stealing a European-made EUV machine?
China cannot be competitive at the razor's edge if its semiconductor companies depend on promptly copying/stealing technology that European, Taiwanese, and American companies bring to market.
7nm doesn't require EUV. Intel has 10nm which is equivalent to TSMC 10nm without EUV, altough it's not that great.
SMIC has already produced some 7nm chips without EUV.
As for EUV for the further future, there has been quite a bit of research in that domain for many years in pre-emption of this, and while I think they will be a node or a node and a half behind for a while, they will almost certainly have one ready eventually. Of course, that will be accelerated by stealing data on EUV machines, or maybe buying a used EUV machine from someone and reverse-engineering it.
China cannot be competitive at the razor's edge if its semiconductor companies depend on promptly copying/stealing technology that European, Taiwanese, and American companies bring to market.