China can compete in the copy tech market, but while they are probably better than average at new tech it will be awhile, a generation as a guess, before they can compete with innovation.
If present trends continue China wont catch up, America will fall behind ...
Americans are innovative, particularly those who do not go to college. College tends to teach you what things are impossible. Learning how to make do or do without tends to teach one how to think and innovate.
The following story demonstrates what I mean: in the 1920s a graduate student at Princeton wrote a thesis on why it was physically impossible to build radio tuning coils small enough to create an automobile radio.
A self-taught man, not knowing it was impossible, went ahead and did it.
“...Tuning coils in the radio frequency stage of a set were rather large and [Bill] Lear knew how to reduce their size by using Litz wire. Wire braided from many fine strands has a large surface area giving it high conductivity at radio frequency. Lear borrowed $5,000 from his friend Algot Olson to make machines to wrap the strands, braid the wire, and wind the coils. The industry was set up in the basement of his mother’s old house on 65th street, and done with assistance of Don Mitchell, a railroad electrician. Lear called the company, Radio Coil and Wire Corporation. They took an order of 50,000 coils from Eugene F. McDonald of Zenith Electronics when they demonstrated them. These small coils were one-quarter the size of coils with solid wire.”
Yes, it is the Lear of Lear Jet fame. Bill Lear never graduated from high school, yet he was a lifelong inventor. And the fellow from Princeton? I can never remember his name!
From a strategic viewpoint why should China rush. She has no foreign wars or obligations with her military. The only flashpoint with the US is if Taiwan declares independence. Other then that China has retreat positions if she cannot bluff her way to what she wants. China can afford to build space station, mission to the moon and aircraft carrier operations at a leisurely pace while her economy expands and her foreign reserves increases as the US decreases. Look up www.globalfirepower.com. China is distant third to US in defense but she has $ 2600 trillion in foreign exchange reserves while the US can only muster $ 150 trillion and decreasing from deficit spending. China’s strength is fiscal not military. Without firing a shot the US due to crippling debt is forced to reduce her military forces and pull back from the world, while China simply fill in the vacuum created. This does not mean China is perfect. She has internal and cultural weakness. The US had the same problems in her rise to world power. War of Southern Succession (American Civil War), racial inequality, labor and environmental abuses is part of our industrialization process. US resolved it thru our Constitutional, Christian, and democratic ideals. China has survived dynastic changes and upheavals and has centuries of experience and the modern world for her leaders to choose from to resolve their own internal social issues.