China is facing a massive demographic cliff (due to 35 years of the One Child Policy). It's been predicted for decades that "China will grow old before it gets rich" and it's way too late to change. From the 2030s onwards, China faces a massive elderly population and dwindling workforce.
The United States has favorable demographics for the next few decades and will certainly be able to keep parity with China. Admittedly the US has started developing issues around demographics (falling fertility rate, and falling immigration), but it's not as dire as China current situation.
A lot of bizarre fantasies about what the Chinese government can and can't do - they are an authoritarian state, not a totalitarian state. The idea that they can enforce multiple births in a culture that is trending sharply away from having multiple kids by waving a wand is just ridiculous. Further, they have barely deployed any serious incentives to have more kids - it would be cheaper and easier to do Scando-style childcare and subsidies.
The other basic fact that your responders ignore is that Western countries have huge immigration rates compared to China, which hardly has any immigration. Their rate is 750 times lower than the USA, for example, and the bulk of immigrants to China (historically) have been from ethnic Chinese populations abroad (notably Vietnam); these populations are also aging.
China invested a lot in biotechnology and has few ethical concerns in this regard. This scenario might be within the realm of possibility for them.
The word for that is "invention" and I believe I used it in correct meaning (not a native speaker of English). There is nothing unthinkable about artificial wombs, though it is obviously hard. The research runs in Western countries as well. If Western scientists thought it was principially impossible to construct such devices ever, they wouldn't probably spend their time and grant money on fiddling around that concept.
Now China has a) a lot of classified research, b) fewer ethical concerns, c) is aware about their future demographic problems stemming from One Child Policy. I would be surprised if they did not at least try this approach.
As for curing aging, the longevity field seems to be more developed in the West so far, even though their aims are more modest - prolonging the healthspan by, say, 8-10 years. While not a solution, such progress would definitely buy some time.
Interestingly, there is a very niche subset of longevity research that looks into reproductive health of women over 40. It is possible, though far from certain, that oocyte quality could be improved even in older women - where aneuploidy is otherwise a big problem.
It may be hard to believe, but the same will inevitably happen to China, and it's near-impossible to change because the damage has already been done. It's the inevitable legacy of enforcing Deng Xiaoping's One Child Policy for 35 years.
What should not be forgotten is that Japan's population is only 1/3 of the US's, that it has extremely limited land resources, and that it is very developed (see GDP per capita). None of these apply to China.
If China had the same GDP per capita as Japan then its economy would be 12x larger than Japan's and 2.6x times larger than the US's.
China is still relatively poor per capita and thus still has a huge margin before reaching a peak, even if breakneck growth cannot be maintained.
Your comment is geopolitical. So I replied accordingly. Technology does not live in a bubble. What is happening is a geopolitical struggle, and when you mention the US barring Arm from Chinese companies or issues with SMIC, this is geopolitical, not purely technology and trying to restrict the discussion purely to technology would be missing the big picture (hence my comment on having a long term plan).
China is far from its peak. When Chinese GDP is 4x the US's GDP then sure, but we're far from that.
I don't understand the demographics argument. China's population is 4x the US's. Global population needs to stabilise (and is bery slowly getting there). To think that the US can simply compete with China (and India) through population growth is bonkers.
"China will grow old before it gets rich" and it's way too late to change
The only authoritarian regime that tried to do so was Romania under Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. He banned abortion and contraception overnight.
There was a massive spike in birth rate that year, but people soon found ways around the ban and birth rate started falling sharply again.
For example since 2007 Russia started to pay “Mother’s capital” for each child born after a first one. ~$10k for a kid.
China has enough money to give away.
Total Fertility Rate in Hungary has grown from abysmal 1.2 to still bad 1.55 or so, still far from simple reproduction, but at least it goes in different direction from most of the developed world.
Long term China is fine. Europe not so much.. US even less so.
Saying that, best bet for China seems to be counting on rural population, and investing heavily in their education.
China can enforce mandatory population growth easily enough (anyone wanting a marriage license must produce a child within 6 months, if not, the marriage is annulled), and if that is on the 10-15 year time horizon, they can easily allow cloning technology be used on humans for the short term.
So they start 3 months in advance? /s
Whatever, I think it's much easier to limit the number of children than to enforce a minimum. Both can be very unwelcomed for many reasons I don't want to get into, but not everybody can have children.
The idea is, "unwelcomed" is not an issue. In the Uighur regions, China is already practicing a form of marriage enforcement to make sure there's more han babies in the region.
Their growth is slowing, they've got major structural issues internally, and the rest of the world is uniting against them.
The US and the West are going to stop playing nice.
There are 1.4 BILLION people in China. Even if in a few decades the entire world has a similar GDP per capita, China will top the list.
It might sound weird to our modern ears. But China has always been this planet's top economy until Europe found America and then 'found' Africa.
Also, scientific power is not the same as developed market. USSR was scientifically strong, but economically weak, ask ex-Soviet citizens how the 1980s looked like - an era of queues for basic necessities.
Those exact words has been making the headlines in the newspapers since 1989 at least, every single year, and yet here we are today, at the point where the US is willing to dismantle half of the global trade only to stop China from accessing whatever useful technology it still has not bought in the West.
Or stolen.
Examples among many other include Nortel/Huawei, Chinese state hackers trying to get into ASML.
And whenever a company wants to do business in China, they need to create a subsidiary in China. The Chinese communist party has a fellow embedded in said subsidiary, and they can veto anything.
The US are particularly powerful because they are both developed and have a large population. Same for Germany in Europe.
Based on that, I don't see why China and India should remain behind the US, even if there'll of course be bumps in the road.
Education and wealth matter a lot. If China can spread this out, then we'll be talking. As it stands, their educated middle class is very concentrated.
The Chinese market was never actually open to American companies. Not long term. They may have had temporary success but the CCP's goal was always to displace and replace with their own domestic competitors.
While the Chinese market may be close off to the US and foreign companies, the world market is greater than just the Chinese market and the American markets. For example, American companies are doing well in India, a market which is increasingly becoming closed to China due to geopolitical tensions.
Of course, any government's goal should be to diversify and not to be too dependent on a single country (like China is dependent on the US at the money). But that indeed should something for the Chinese government to worry about and, arguably, not for the US to force their hand in a move that will actually benefit China in the long term.
[1] https://www.semiconductors.org/the-largest-share-of-u-s-indu...
Well, in the short term, American companies are making a pretty penny in China.
Apple benefits from China in two ways. 1) Cheap labor, and 2) huge sales of their products to the Chinese themselves.
Even Facebook, which doesn’t work in China, is making $5 billion in revenue annually from ad sales.
By the way, bringing in politics to a discussion about tech with those comments on Iraq is best avoided.
Check you first paragraph, it is political commentary as well. Also, this whole topic is 99% politics and very little technology.
But longer term it creates a trend in which Armerican companies themselves will struggle in China. So what? Well, China will overtake the US so ultimately the US will have a disadvantage in the world's top market.
Edit: That's a key issue with the US's strategy with China, which seems to be focused on the short term (One might argue that they did the same mistake in Iraq in Afghanistan...) The point is that relations with China are a long game and China certainly plays a long game. The US need a long term plan and to accept that they cannot keep the top spot indefinitely.