Sure, so - what does the American approach have to recommend it? Why shouldn't I leave for China, the apparent winning team?

By all means, if that’s how you feel, you should explore that possibility.

Fairness, values, work on smaller scales. When you get to city/state/country scale, like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, China, US do - it’s not a good strategy because your opponents/peers have no alternative but to deal with you, and unless you are going on an all out war, it’s mostly slap and tickle regardless of what you actually do.

This is a hard question, to be completely honest. Let me put it this way: I think that if the goal is maximizing the potential for accruing power and influence for your country, the Chinese system is probably better in the long run - especially in the post-post 9/11 world. The American system offers stronger fundamentals (no nasty fertility cliff in ~15 years, a strong but increasingly fractured understanding of global responsibility, a law system that still does protect political speech) but a less clear approach on how, exactly, the government is going to ensure this prosperity gravy train that we’ve been riding since the Soviet Union fell continues.

Not the parent you're responding to but the answer I see is that in the modern understanding of geopolitics (like 19th century and onwards), "fairness" and "values" aren't considerations at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

This is an active topic of discussion actually. In general the trinity of qualities that result in a "strong in the real way" country have been approached as realism, nationalism, and liberty. The scholarly community is currently in conflict because in the modern era one of these things is seemingly very unimportant compared to the others.

Previously, it was believed that liberty contributed to economic output for a myriad of reasons that boil down to "free markets". There's an emerging, albeit more romantically framed, belief that diversity and too much liberty are actually handicaps because both can retard a government's ability to engage in realist policy while, at the same time, deminishing the homoginizing effects of nationalism which has its own independent benefits but which also acts as a lubricant for realist action. This is not to say all assumptions and observations about liberal policies have been wrong, it's more about re-assessing our understanding about the magnitude and utility of these effects.

Please point me to some of this discussion. I'm very interested, especially if it relates to technology development and the requisite supply chains involved.