Chinese engineer working in China here. You totally missed the point.
> bet against the Chinese
criticize the lack of innovation is not betting against anyone. it is obvious that China is not leading in anything that can potentially lead to the next industrial revolution.
as explained, no one is betting against China, but would you bet on China to be the next No.1 tech superpower? personally, I won't, my day to day life here tells me that it lacks literally all key ingredients required for such success.
not saying it is not doing okish, but doing ok including becoming the world's largest economy and tech investor is not that fancy when it is purely backed by a huge population size. On a per capita basis, R&D spending is extremely low, I couldn't name any single high tech company here that has a deep & healthy engineering culture.
> taking advantage of western smugness
the west has all the reasons to be "smugness", just look at the recent developments, reusable rockets, private trips to the space, the satellite internet constellation, ChatGPT, mRNA vaccine, the 100% remission rate for a certain type of colon cancer...the list goes really really long and I am just talking about progresses made in the last 3 years.
tell me what Chinese counterparts are? some cheap EV cars made with highly toxic materials? or maybe some mobile apps that popup ten ads for making each online order? or maybe you are talking about the so called online payment system that literally locked an entire generation of senior citizens out of real social life?
> They improved so much in the last three decades
I live & work in Shanghai, a typical match box sized apartment inside the outer ring road now costs 1 million USD when the average wage is $10k USD per annual. Simple maths tells me that one need to be keep working since the end of WWI non stop to buy such an apartment - assuming you don't need to pay tax and you don't eat, drink, buy cloth.
If you work harder to get yourself a fancy Chinese EV there, you can drive your "symbol of personal success" to a countryside, in just 2 hours, you can get to a fancy province called Anhui where you will be welcomed by millions of locals making $1k USD per annual. Don't get too shocked when you realize that those on $1k USD per annual is actually the lucky one, the pension rate is about $25 USD per month.
You need to be totally blind to call all these "improved so much".