PRC state driven industrial policies are hilariously efficient against entrenched (western) incumbants, because the alternative is to not be competitive at all since new competitors simply can't compete against moat of established western companies with resources that rival government funding, no less US cheap money. PRC scale is large enough to do that, meanwhile most countries countries/blocs too small or uncoordinated to even try.

That's why US/west copying PRC industrial policies, because PRC industrial policy is initially "inefficient", and then they become absurdly efficient, saturating domestic market at first, then export massive surplus to globe, and eats away at western shares. Analysis of PRC moving up value chain and global export share on PV, telecom, android smartphone, display panel shows reduction in operating margin of leading companies by 50-90%. Hence US is trying to stop PRC semi. And I'm guessing west on PRC EV soon. Because the efficiency of PRC indy policy is also measured in making western companies less productive.

As for PRC brain drain, Chinese academics/talent in west floating back to PRC in record numbers. Those are good portends vs statistically insignificant % of millionaires trying to hide their money abroad. Which entire ignores the fact that PRC generates so much domestic talent now that west can't meaningfuly braindrain even if they wanted to. PRC is in process of milking the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. It took PRC 20 years to build up ~15M STEM talent to catch up in west in most sectors except extremely difficult integration projects like aviation and semi. She's generating that much talent every 3-4 years now.

The PRC bet on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and got burned. Their constant whining about Taiwan and childish insistence that Tienanmen Square never happened makes them the laughingstock of the world. Their continued support for the demented lapdog regime in North Korea is similarly laughable. Their deification of gangsters like Mao and Deng puts them on a par with other unserious regimes as North Korea and the former USSR.

China's massive digital divide is shameful, as is its neglect and brutalization of ethnic minorities. China's sexism is notorious the world over, as is its noxious pollution and the utter disregard its companies have for environmental laws. There's little for the West to copy, and even less the West should copy.

i can tell you watch a lot of youtube videos on why china is bad.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing but “you’re wrong” is much less compelling than “here are some concrete ways in which your list is misleading”.

There's posts elsewhere in the comment thread with concrete reasons. I'll horribly paraphrase them: the demographic collapse is less of a problem than westerners think because China has a high home ownership[0] rate and home-owning adults are way more likely to have children. Old people will just die alone and unloved in China like they do in Japan. China captures enough of the electronics value chain that existing 'derisking policies' practically amount to 'move final assembly to Mexico to evade tariffs.' They're nowhere close to being food dependent.

I'm not entirely convinced by this, of course. But it's important to note that headwinds are not brick walls. And even the inevitable next collapse of the Russian Empire will probably not happen for years, if ever. There are levels of survival that the elites who run sovereign states are willing to accept.

[0] On the timescales of normal family planning, the difference between home ownership and a ninety-nine year lease with no rent payment is immaterial.

It's not really propaganda but a real-world challenge for us. I worked in the American solar industry and in the span of a few years, China went from irrelevant to eating up most of the world's producers and production. Now they are the overwhelming source of most of the world's solar panels and the American and European companies largely folded because we just couldn't compete with their combination of cheap labor, advanced factories, and state sponsorship.

China has its problems and its risks, to be sure, but it would be dangerous to underestimate their hybrid model of quasi-capitalism, quasi-communism. What is freedom limiting at the small scale (why would I innovate when the government owns me) can become absolute beasts at sufficient economies of scale. When they decide something is of national priority, they can top down refocus much of the national productivity (both money and people) towards it and then spin up a multinational logistics chain behind it across Asia and Africa. Then they scale up and dominate. It's happened to many industries already and just saying "China bad" isn't going to stop it.

It's like a game of Factorio played well, except with a billion workers and a lot of money that can be moved around at will. We see similar effects in the West during controlled wartime economies (when production can be directed to a particular cause), or government subsidies and money injections (like during covid, or with the infrastructure bill). It's also how our military is run, for example, and most of our big companies. Top down control economies have certain efficiencies (and inefficiencies) of scale that a bunch of small businesses don't have. But when it comes to commodity manufacturing, it's hard to beat their hybrid approach.