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The truth is somewhere in the middle. What you see is a project, the same as everything else. What you don't see is also a project.
In China, while innovation has definitely gotten much better, the method of thinking and philosophy seem better suited in America, because Americans will rake themselves over broken glass for that one 0.001% of optimization. They are obsessed with it. Silicon valley breeds techbros by the boatload who want to move fast and break things so they can "disrupt the market" or optimize even the act of drinking a smoothie. And they have all the money, so there's a market and funding for these things.
On the other hand, China absolutely dominates speed of deployment and iteration. Time to market, time to launch, time to prototype. This is partly a result of having all the manufacturing clustered so tightly together, and partly a result of the wonky path of development they went through, where they skipped entire fields and built newer, different infrastructure without the problem of having to deal with creaking legacy. Greenfield will always be easier than brownfield.
The biggest problem China has is systemic corruption. The biggest problem I consider the West to have in comparison is bureaucratic apathy and a lack of political will. These manifest in different ways in the society they are in. The Chinese failure mode is naked power law; the corrupt can win every time, so you either have to be even more corrupt or even more powerful than the corrupt (this usually ends up in winner-take-all Politburo games). Smarter Chinese governments work around this by playing smaller factions against each other. The Western failure mode is abdication of responsibility; an endless chain of committees, regulation and lawsuit risk management so nobody bothers anymore, and real power isn't in the political organs so why bother? Put me in government, so I can draw a salary without governing.
Meanwhile, in China, Xi can just say "I want that mountain gone" and everyone will fall over themselves to get it done ASAP, by whatever means necessary. Blasting powder, industrial equipment, artillery, slaves with pickaxes. The method (and potential fallout) doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the result. But hey, that's the benefit of an autocratic system.
Chinese demographics really, really matter. The thing is, that problem is the same problem everyone else has, and China is unwilling to import foreigners by the boatload. The state is really concerned about the demographic problem, because it keeps them paid. My worry is that if they throw their entire state apparatus at "solving" this, I don't know what that solution looks like. I do have a sneaking suspicion that it's something nobody from the West could stomach, even if Western governments may privately wish they had the same level of power over their citizens.
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