All the Chinese government has to do to accomplish this is sit back and wait. There's plenty smart Chinese engineers and the market forces will do the rest.
(Source: I freelanced for a Chinese-owned lithography startup some years ago. It got run into the ground by bad management but that doesn't change much about my observations about market forces and Chinese engineers)
I have a hard time taking the rest of your list all too seriously given that the one I know something about is, I think, mistaken.
This might be important. A free-market economy is more conductive to both creating new businesses and to killing those ran poorly, thus evolving better teams faster. OTOH a nepotic economy launches fewer companies by constricting the talent pool with nepotism and corruption, and it faces additional headwind in disbanding the failing teams. Nepotism also destroys the investor class, the one that accumulates collective knowledge about numerous failings and rare successes of new businesses.
Nepotic economies do well in copying what worked for others because the few nephews of the top party officials provide enough of a talent pool for that, but innovation by its nature requires a talent dragnet across the entire country (YC). Failing that it's back to copying the American tech, which has an advantage (and a disadvantage) of working quite well up to a point.
China runs a very large free market economy. The government only steps in when a company grows large, and mandate certain amount of state control. And we all know for sure that companies worth the notice of a national government probably should be placed under some control, instead of letting them blindly chasing the profit. And at that stage, their innovative prowess probably is also dragged down by enormous internal beauracracy that the intervention actually can help them focus on long-term technical investment (thinking about the flops of the big corps, the wasted investment by IBM on what they called AI...)
Thinking about Google, they are even seriously considering bending over to CCP to enter Chinese market. Imagine Google were under CCP control, anyone who dare to speak of such idea will be punished immediately. (Not to say CCP is better in any way)
If you have a free market economy with a size of 5-6 trillions of dollar, then you can have top-tier innovation all the time. And CCP feels pretty safe as long as it controls another 10 trillions+ market...
See, that's the economy of scale.
That's why ambitious people dream of scale, and smart people instead of value freedom. When combined, the one with ambition provides the scale to tolerate the freedom of the smart. That's how China works today.
Of cuz, Xi dreams of world domination. Precisely because he dreams of world domination, he can act absolutely like a open-minded market economy advocate: there is plenty of space under his control, where anyone, ambitious or smart, will have enough space for their personal satisfaction.
Dictators were born out of lack of imagination. Trump is not enlightened to see the possibility of his power, so he inevitably behave like a dictator, but not actually able to because of the US system.
True dictator like Xi, see the possibility, and is willing to behave like appropriate for the goal of ultimate domination.
Their first reusable rocket is due for a test launch in a few months, their second domestic carrier is in construction, and in hypersonics they are, by the DoD's own admission, well ahead.
They have a fully domestic rocket online with a launch reliability over 94%, and their launch cost is only barely higher than that of the Falcon 9, at around 70 million dollars vs 50 million. They are also building a super-heavy, 140 000 kg LEO rocket.
In silicon tech, they have a 14nm fab online, which is hardly "decades behind".
In sat tech, they have pretty much all they could ask for.
I don't really get this viewpoint. China doesn't really advertise their capabilities, but it's clear that they aren't far behind in more than a few crucial sectors, and clearly ahead in others. At this point they are near competitors of the west.
In most areas, western technology and capability, given the will, still leads China. However, China excels at getting capabilities fielded and generally benefits strongly from a unified desire to leap ahead. They can often accomplish things that are potent, but executed in a cruder way than would the west. No matter though, if they can field the capability and it is "good enough".
At least in the U.S., profound dysfunction and misalignment of incentives exist between high-level intent at the Secretary of Defense level and fielded capability.
A historical trope was that the Chinese are not creative problem solvers or researchers, unlike the west. Anyone paying any attention to relevant technical areas should be thoroughly disabused of such thinking. There is some impressive conceptual work China contributes to the technical literature.
I think you are in for a rude awakening.
Despite being the second largest economy of the world, only 4.3% of international trade happens in in the Yuan [1]. People do not want give their oil and wheat in exchange for Yuans! Countries do not see the Yuan as a valuable reserve currency, which reflects their trust in the Chinese system. Since the majority if international trade happens in US Dollars, China needs to trade with the US to get Dollars.
The US on the other hand produces much more food and energy it needs.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3027506/...
If you have a 1-year stockpile of food, produce only enough food for 50% of your population to not go hungry, and depend on imports to make up the slack, that is a dampening force on the decision to go to war.
These agreements are now negotiated at the national level in trade agreements, and at the international level by the WTO. It's a very different system from the one that existed prior to WWI.
...
Although, that's not to say that trade did not play a role in WWI!
Incidentally, the German pre-WWI german economy was dependent on migrant labor from Poland and Russia to exercise successful harvests in Prussia. When WWI broke out, they were not able to replace these migrant laborers in the fields, and experienced crop failures.
This led to significant food shortages during the war, signaled by large increases in the price of bread, in particular.
The military elites (Luddendort, Hindenburg) of the country must have known why prices were rising (because there was a gaping hole in supply), but successfully spun the narrative for the common folk that it was merchants (price-setters) who were to blame for the war.
Needless to say, price being a function of supply and demand, and the post-zollvereini/unification interdependence of the German commodities economy was not as popularly-understood of a concept as antisemitism.
The reality was that the war was poorly-planned and poorly-executed, but this was an unconscionable admission for the Prussian elites.
This was one of the load-bearing columns for the dolchstoss myth that was weaponized to develop German anti-semitism in the interwar years.
Remember how much struggle there was distributing even simple things like masks and PPE during the COVID pandemic?
Of course you can solve the boots problem, but you'll have the same variant of problem for a lot of things. Solving all these problems all at once is an insurmountable task.
Even building a single Photolitography plant takes hundreds of millions of USD and years from start of planning to conclusion, with the involvement of a large number of companies from around the globe, each specialized to their own part of the process, and world leader in that part. So where will you manufacture your chips needed for your autonomous robot army?
Modern advanced scientific methods and technologies are incredibly sophisticated and complex. In the 1940s you could churn out a dozen new aircraft carriers, squadrons of fighters for them and send them on their way. With modern electronic warfare, sensor, weaponry and avionics systems that’s just not possible, especially if you dont have three generations of experience in carrier operations to draw on. That’s why China is still struggling to get one vessel even partially operational. It’s all new Chinese aircraft, weapons, electronics and systems. They’re trying to jump from 1940 to 2020 in one leap.
I’m positing this not entirely from speculation, but from observation of how things have gone for them so far and why. They will get there, absolutely, but the cutting edge is an awful long way away from the basics. You have to go through making a crapload of mistakes and dead ends before you find the right paths. That’s the difference between following a known trail and discovering new ones un-trod by others.
I suspect you haven't traveled to China recently, if you had it'd be pretty hard to claim the things you're claiming about where China is.
But that is just on the surface. What may not be as well-known are asymetric weapons platforms that are cheaper to operate and have been demonstrated effectiveness against larger naval vessels, within the US's own military war game exercises. In the last one, the oppositional team had been able to use such platforms to defeat their larger opponents, to the point that the exercise was cancelled. China has definitely been developing those weapons platforms. (I think the US has been as well, but the US also need to maintain the facade that the carrier groups are the premier projection of power).
Furthermore, the cultural aspects are eroding. The US military is a voluntary service organization, which has been the leading explanation of why the US can field multiple carrier groups, and no other country could. However, training and operational fitness has been eroding. This is what lead to the several naval disasters a couple years ago. They threw the commanding officers under the bus, but the deeper causes are (1) erosion of quality training for ship handling and (2) the personnel are running ragged, where normal ship operations are being affected (let alone what that says about their ability to operate in wartime conditions). This all happened within the US 7th Fleet, that operates within China's sphere of influence.
It's just as well that US pressure on China is being exerted through a trade war instead of military positioning.
(I also have had talks with friends about space-based kinetic weapons platforms, which, if fielded, changes the game dramatically in favor of the US).
As far as China's economic and technological power in the civilian sector ... There is a lot of advantages there. Probably the biggest thing is that China has cultural unity, greater economic optimism, and a cohesive will of the populous to catch up and displace US as the leading world superpower. The US, in contrast, is wracked with a culture war, and 70 years of policing the world and 30 years of trying to maintain the post-Cold War liberal order has left a very tired, pessimistic country.
China does not have more cultural unity, it simply has more of a stomach for suppressing minority or rebellious subcultures. See: Tibetans, Mongolians, Hong Kongers, Uyghurs.
The Tibetans are a great example. Both the Mongolian and Manchurian descended rulers had left Tibet as an autonomous region primarily because the rulers themselves were Buddhist. However, the Qing dynasty had asserted state power over the theocratic rule of the Tibetan lamas, including changing how the tulkas (such as the Dalai Lama) were identified and selected. That all happened in mid-1800s.
The contemporary assimilation of Tibet comes from well-used playbook the Chinese have employed:
1. Suppression of the written language and standardizing on the same written script
2. Suppression or assimilation of cultural symbols and ideas
3. Imprisonment or subornment of cultural leaders (such as the monks and nuns, or if you read this whole drama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorje_Shugden_controversy ... the main protest organization got shut down when allegations of funding from the Chinese intelligence apparatus came out)
3. Colonization by assimilated groups
4. Creation of economic and trade ties (such as the railway that was built all the way to Lhasa).
You can actually see some of this going on, if less aggressively, in Africa. China, after all, have a rich history in developing and maintaining vassal states.
These are things the US is not willing to do. And I am not saying that it is ethical or moral. The result though is that China has far greater cultural unity than the US currently has.
US government does not need to do this explicitly.
US culture outreach is effective and efficient. Prior to 2008 financial crisis, Chinese common wisdom places US superior to Chinese in every aspects. You can put Xi in that period, and see how ineffective his ambition can be implemented.
It was only after US culture outreaches have been intoxicated by self-righteousness and a chronicle ineffectiveness, think about the Arab Spring and the 2016 election debacle, and the TikTok deal, and the disastrous Covid response.
Government directed culture assimilation is always the least effective. That's used only when the civilian system is weak. In Mao's era, they dont need this, the civilian system is so effective in assimilating proactively across the whole nation. Think about the havoc by Mao. Mao can do that, because the society is utterly centered around his ideology. Precisely that the time, it was the government that is ineffective in counteract the population's attachment to a demi-god.
However, I don't think a cohesive will in the populus will emerge anytime soon. We have at least two major factions talking past each other here in the US (along with a lot of other points of contention: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...)
An interesting period to consider is that of the Ming dynasty. They were expansionist up until a point, and then they turned inwards. Recalled their expedition fleets. Expanded the Great Wall. They were shutting down steel foundaries at a time when the European colonialism was getting started. It reminds me (at least superficially) much of US today. A narrative of why the Ming turned inward has been subject to a lot of discussion, particularly since they had the economic and technological might to preempt the industrialization of Europe.
(But I think it is also histories like this gets the Chinese thinking about their perceived rightful place as the world's leading superpower).
Huh? First Manchuria equals Qing in my limited remembrance of imperial history. Second, the Manchurians were Buddhist?
I am also not saying all of the ethnic Manchurians were Buddhists. I didn't get that deeply into the history.
I do know that the Mongolians greatly respected the tulkas of Tibet, with branches of the Tibetan Buddhis monastaries found in Mongolia. The search for reincarnations also extends out into Mongolia. The review mentioned that -- during the Song dynasty, the Mongolians let the Tibetans have enough autonomy to concern the Hans, and politically, they were seeing if the Qing emperors will do the same. The creation of the Golden Urn lottery system was a way to assert state power while also respecting the religious process in Tibet. (Whereas, in contrast, I think the Chinese selection of the Pachan Lama and control of the "tulka" was done as part of the cultural assimilation and oppression program by the Chinese). But yeah, the impetus for the Chinese conquest of Tibet in the twentieth century was centuries in the making.
But people probably were so indulged in mainstream media's reporting that, this hardly register to anyone as significant.
They launched their first domestic carrier last year, actually. Evidence is they are starting to get more serious about their navy. 3 more under construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_progr...
https://www.diamandis.com/blog/shenzhen-global-hardware-capi...
Huawei had basically cornered the 5G technology, getting all competitors out of the market, but then Trump ended it.
China is buying strategically important technology companies from around the globe, like Kuka for example, and then moves the knowledge into their country.
If this trend continues, eventually we'll be in the same situation again where we have to imitate China, not vice versa. It's only a few hundred years ago when China sold extremely expensive porcelain to europe and we reverse engineered porcelain manufacturing (check out Johann Friedrich Böttger).
There are arguments against China's continued rise that are rooted in demographics, politics, and social issues, but the Chinese are definitely capable of doing what Americans and Europeans do if all else is equal.
Racism is nonsense, and like other forms of nonsense believing it makes you gullible and foolish.
Of course the west, or the developed democracies are much more than just the USA. Also while China is catching up in many areas, it is far behind in many of the ones that really count. China's military infrastructure and military technology is far, far behind. They have been struggling for almost a decade to get even one refurbished Russian aircraft carrier operational. Their space launch and satellite technology is decades behind, as is their silicon chip tech.
China is almost caught up to the USA by itself in raw industrial and economic power, they're close to parity, but this is just muscle. On the technology front they are still copying the basic stuff. It will take them another generation to catch up to the west in the ability to innovate in new technologies. They will do it though. It's just a matter of time. Then they will be a match for the west as a whole, not just the USA.