> Reality: It is very hard to argue America is as wealthy or innovative as it was, or as China is proving to be. In evaluating that assertion its important to note that absent production of desirable goods & services no country can maintain its wealth.
Really? Mean US wealth per capita and net wealth per capita is still growing fast YoY, and China will eventually hit the top of the S-curve, at the same time they run into a huge demographic problem with an inverted demographic pyramid.
And how do you define innovation? China does a lot of incremental improvement on disruptive innovation that occurred elsewhere, but no major disruptive innovations that have launched entirely new fields of study or industry sectors have arisen out of China in the last decades as far as I'm aware.
Let me give some examples: The PC, the GUI/DTP Mac Era, the Smartphone, The Web, Cryptocurrency, Deep Learning, FDM 3D Printing, Tesla-like EVs, SpaceX-like reusable rockets/NewSpace/etc These are all areas where China produces very compelling products, but the spark that kicked off these huge product categories didn't come from China. I love DJI drones for example, but they aren't the company that got everyone excited about drones, Parrot AR was. 3D printing has been around for ages, but it was Makerbot RepRap/University of Bath which kicked off the huge consumer 3D printing race.
And cryptocurrency has been slowly developing since the 90s, as an anti-statist measure by crypto-anarchist libertarians, obviously not a field of study the CCP would look kindly on. Again, most of the math and developments, did not originate from the Mainland. Which is ironic, because you'd expect if you live under a lot of statist restrictions, wouldn't circumvention technology be an area of hot underground research? Yet most of the tools, onion routing, VPNs, distributed hash table file sharing, anonymous remailers, crypto tools like PGP, all came from the West and people looking to avoid liberal democratic government restrictions and copyright regimes.
China is also deploying AI surveillance like crazy, but did the explosion of interest and investment in DNNs/CNNs/etc arise from a Chinese breakthrough, or was it the result of years of work in the academic and commercial sector in the West, culminating in easy to use tools like Torch and Tensorflow, and off the shelf components to glue together, which made those rapid deployments in China possible?
Another example I hear: China is ahead in Quantum Computing. Well, no, they've managed to extend distance records on quantum cryptography/computation, and qubits, but who invented quantum computing? Peter Shor was the first to develop a practical quantum algorithm, and that's one of the big drivers that triggered a renewed flood of interest. That's disruptive innovation, because it changes the world -- one day people are doing X, the next day, a big chunk of people drop what they've doing, and all rush in to do Y.
And you can usually feel this innovation when it happens. All of us old timers had 'smartphones' before 2007, iPAQs, PalmPhones, Nokia Communicator 9000, etc On January 9th, 2007 after you saw the iPhone presentation, you knew the world had changed. It doesn't happen often, and you are lucky to witness it.
I wish China was producing their own Steve Jobs, they've got 1.4 billion people, and the world would be better off if more disruptive innovation happening, but Jack Ma and Lei Jun are no Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.
Fundamentally, liberal arts and sciences are about criticism. Self criticism. The ability to critique society, the government, the establishment, to rebel against it, to agitate for change is crucial for artistic and scientific revolution. And I just don't feel the CCP is conducive to creating an environment like that, when you can be jailed for writing a movie review of the latest state sponsored epic War Movie and give it a bad rating. (recently a movie critic was jailed for calling "The Battle at Lake Changjin" a "potboiler" in his review)