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People still seem to be missing the paradigm shift that’s coming with advanced in computation over the next two decades.
I’ve said it before here, but I’ll repeat myself.

The first person to get AI wins, and it doesn’t matter how many people, engineers or PHds you have (even billions), China can’t compete with self engineering AI systems.

This is if you accept exceptionally optimistic notions like those coming from MIT alum Kurzweil. And even if you don’t, clearly, the lead people have in automation and computing technology will blast beyond the manpower of communist China.
Who’s getting the patents for this technology? MSFT for example, and Japanese and Korean companies.
Not China. And China must uphold the law. Therefore, China is a paper tiger IMHO.

China also should have owned the world in the last two centuries eh?
If manpower were the key, it would have.

But manpower wasn’t the key then and they didn’t. Turned out technology was the key.

But the paradigm shift was subtle then too, just as it is now.

Robotics and technology can easily overpower and squash manpower and human engineering.

You can bet Japan sees this and Japan ultimately will dominate Asia(followed in a close second by KOR).

I’d bet my 401k on it.

China is living in both the 21st and 19th Century. It's intense nationaliztic behavior is that of a 19th Century imperialist power, in many ways it's practicing “catching up” of what the other world powers went thru in the 19th Century - complete with sense of manifested destiny, chauvinistic nationalism, and deploying military power as a blunt political and expansionist, empire building tool.

Except the world is not in the 19th Century anymore.

Much of China's schism with the west is - from Chinese perspective, that China is not doing anything that the western (and Japanese) imperial power didn't themselves do back in the 18th and 19th century - in fact, with some of that western imperialism applied towards China. So China tend to reject western objection to Chinese policies as hypocritical in a historical context.

But, we don't live in the 19th Century anymore. And what China is doing in its exercise of modern imperialism is clearly not acceptable in the 21st Century.

The trick is how do we get China off it's 19th Century based mindset and join the 21st Century?