Well, what we've seen so far is that everything they make that's any good, they've imported the production line from the West. Another problem is that there's no real evidence the Chinese are able to come with completely new stuff on their own. In this respect, they're like the Taiwanese, the Japanese and the Koreans. There's a lot of incremental improvements, but nothing that is a generational leap vis-a-vis the existing state of the art. I'm sure the Chinese will eventually make fine cars, and so on. But truly revolutionary technology (and science) is likely to be the province of the West for a while yet.
I do hope you’re right — statistically there are alot of Chinese, and a huge number of them are bright enough to attend the very best schools in the world. There are huge numbers of them attending our universities in New Zealand, for example.
And many of them are scoring at the very top of the class.
It would be a blessing if none of them — not even one — were smart enough to be able to innovate and devise new ideas in the near-or-not-too-distant future. If so, that would be a statistical improbability, and a lovely piece of luck for Western Civilization.
Should we count on it?
Ever look around a US college campus to see how many asians are in the Engineering & Mathematics departments? I'd be a little bit careful making a broad statement about creativeness. All that China needs to do is train AND keep the talent and they too will be cutting edge.
Besides, how do we know that the Chinese are not already working on "game changing" technology? If I want to defeat an F22, probably the least effective way to go about it is to try to build a better version of it & hope that you can match the pilot training. Any failure in that chain-of-events and you've just chucked 10's of Billions of dollars down a rathole.