The PISA scores they’ve done so far have been limited to Shanghai (the richest city) and then I think Zhejiang or Jiangsu (the richest provinces). It isn’t really a good sample of the entire country. I’ll be convinced when they release the scores for Henan :).

Western institutions biggest advantage is the ability to easily leverage worldwide talent, which is incidentally China’s biggest deficiency. A lot of China’s human capital, for example, has helped with the success of America’s tech industry.

Humans can be enhanced in other ways that don’t involve messing so finely with Mother Nature. We can simply develop and use better tools, for example.

I don’t agree with this. Population size has not been the driving factor for technology development historically.