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Empirically, GDP growth is higher than ours, and they're an increasingly large part of earth's industrial and scientific base (measuring by goods produced, scientific papers written.) I understand the impetus to blame copying and catch-up effects, but I think that's cope; if it were true their growth would be going s-shaped but instead they're releasing Deepseek and producing electric vehicles and solar technology better than everyone else.
They're per capita gdp is still much lowe, it's not chips to notice that it's catch up effects. China didn't even contain the most productive Chinese people. Do you think deepseek is still ahead?
I bring up GDP growth because I think it's a good indicator of innovation-relative-to-resources. I'll concede that if we had some measure of absolute innovation, the chinese would probably not be ahead-- but the important part is that they're system structurally advantages them, and as the resource gap closes their innovation will accelerate, not decelerate.
The fact that the most productive chinese people live outside of china is the opposite of reassuring-- it means they're not even operating at their full power level. As china approaches parity with the US, while also having better infrastructure and standard of living for elites, re-immigration will look increasingly attracive. That's a double benefit for them-- strengthening them at the cost of the west.
America's main competitive advantage is it's historical ability to drain the best brains of the entire planet, but Trump is putting sort of a damper on that given his obvious hostility to even university-educated immigrants.
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