The problem is, some things, many, in fact, don’t fit your “picture”. For example, in a “former life” I dealt directly with both US and Chinese ceramic magnet manufacturers. The worst of the US suppliers were better than the bottom 2/3 of the Chinese vendors, for sure. But, a couple of the Chinese suppliers could match the quality, etc., and sometimes even delivery (!) of any of the US suppliers. And, there was one (quite big) Chinese mfgr. whose quality and consistency was just plain better than any US vendor, they had excellent staff (including a US born sales engineer) AND they blew the US vendors out of the water when it came to price, especially if a custom part needed to be tooled. No one at the company I worked for really wanted to use a Chinese vendor, but, to stay in business / be competitive, we had to.
Then there were the cold forged steel parts mfgrs. The best of the Chinese factories were freaking unbelievable — and I’ve been in some pretty impressive US factories. These Chinese factories were, er, are HUGE (especially given that the average part they make is maybe 4” x 4” x 2”), they are efficient (lots of automated and / or semi automated processes), and they crank out a very good product. There is NOTHING a US plant could do to be 25x, or even 10x more “productive” per worker. 2x, maybe, and a US plant would have lower shipping costs to their US customers.
Now, if serious innovation is involved, then we (the US) do have advantages (unless the Chinese mfgr. goes out and hires some US or Euro engineers, which some do.)
The language advantage lies at least partially in English’ large vocabulary and capacity for nuance, while also providing, when need be, a high degree of “precision”. A great example is the comparison of the number of words English has to describe weather. My wife (a Filipina) is very intelligent (started off in engineering, in fact) and spoke quite good English before coming to the US. But in her language (Visayan) she can come up with maybe 10 words tops to describe weather.
Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) are very good at refining and perfecting but do not innovate a whole lot. Innovation is largely the province of America and Israel and will stay that way. It seems to have something to do with compatible systems of law and government and with the English language. Israel’s business and scientific people all are essentially English speakers. They do it as well as Brits or Americans. Oriental perfection of American products is not a bad thing. Oriental top businesses will relocate to the US so long as the Chinese government permits if we proclaim an unrestricted free market system regardless of what other countries do about it. Without all the government hampering and restriction Americans can and will outproduce everyone else i.e. make things cheaper and better and more new stuff i.e. our workers will produce more product per dollar of worker cost than anyone else in the world and the world’s industry will strive to relocate here, even the Chinese.