Politicians are 'supposed' to be honest, flying cars were 'supposed' to be the norm by the 1980's. Those claims weren't true, and neither is yours.
Those are *their* claim, not mine.
Please point to a *English* peer reviewed on-line article detailing what is 100% identical, what isn't and why between the GD32F103 and the STM32F103?
1) They can not make it actually 100% identical otherwise they will be sued into oblivion. Using a built-in QSPI controller and a bonded SPI Flash is enough of a difference to fend off those lawsuits.
2) There are a lot of opinions on Chinese communities urging folks like GD to entirely drop their English documentations, even on the basis of just irking the Five Eyes citizens. Should those articles exist, they will be in Chinese, and it will have to be YOU learning Chinese in order to read those, since absolutely nobody are permitted to translate it without either getting sued or catch the absolute mother load of flak.
3) You want peer-reviewed and online article... I am sensing some internal conflicts.
For starters, I'd like to know how the GD use of a stacked and glued SPI mirror ram in the place of on-mcu flash makes it the *same*.
It may make it better, it may make it worse, (depending what you want to do) but it won't make it a 'drop-in replacement for STM32F103 line'.
You throughly underestimate what folks at GD can pull off.
The same goes for the several other counterfit STM32F103 chips made in China by CKS, APM etc.
Imitation and compatible designs =/= counterfeit. The ST legal department has learned that a long time ago, otherwise they would have sued.
The fact that so many GD32F103's ended up re branded as STM32F103 in Blue Pills shows that someone in China cared.
When did Blue Pill became that strongly associated with STM32F103? There has always been multiple versions of that - STM32F103, GD32F103, etc.
The fact that CKS use STM only ID's in their chips shows they cared.
About what?
Do you think that Western buyers knowing that the Chinese chips and products sold internationally are made by people for whom 'near enough' is 'close enough', will actually buy any of your products ?
AFAIK you are still buying. If you have some serious applications that only demands the best of the best, even if I have a project that demands the best of the best, I will take care not to use those replacement chips. However how many of those products actually needs that level of quality to begin with?
Personally I'd rather you reply had been, "Yes its a big problem here, we shoot all the counterfeiters we can find, and we are working tirelessly to make better chips, cheaper than the western ones, can I send you some free samples of our new mcu's and a 5000 page detailed technical manual PDFs in English ?"
Sorry buddy, you will only be getting Chinese documentations down the road, so start learning the world's lingua franca of the future before it is too late. Also unless there is a patent on chip pinouts (which is not patentable to begin with) there will always be compatible and imitations, which is always fully legal worldwide.