China had a big push to promote engineering a few decades ago. A recent quote "China is the world's top producer of engineering graduates, producing around 1.4–1.5 million graduates annually, which is about one-third of the world's total." They also took over as the world's workshop making a lot of our stuff.

There was a lot of competition making things like batteries and if you look at the CEOs of the biggest battery producers there, CATL and BYD they are both very technical and near genius level. Making good batteries is probably quite hard.

That's a very good point.

Germany was always brilliant at mechanical engineering, their universities are decent in general, but very good at all forms of mechanical/chemical engineering.

US is mad keen on software and entrepreneurship and its top universities churn out software startup founders like nowhere else. It's just a pity software ain't what it was 10 years ago.

Perhaps the deep cadres of really well educated engineers, and thus available work force, is the determining factor here.