It's the story the new generations tell themselves that's taken hold last few years. IIRC context is SMEE chairman (maker of PRC litho machine) said EUV is made by man, not god. Became rally for PRC industry and national confidence. X is made by man, not god for anything PRC needs to catchup on. Which circles back to Qian Xuesen, foreign people can build rockets, why can't we. Or more recently, foreign people are good at XYZ events, why can't we. AKA anything they can do we can do.

The bigger undercurrent is divide between faction of people who think EUV impossible or possible. Between boomer/doomers (older, never do better than west types) and young techno-optimists, faction generation/education divided. TLDR PRC technical talent skews young, and techwar as spurned wave of scifi optimists, techno nationalists and industrialist party way of thinking. It's not homogeneous but it's dominant, especially in S&T after quick ascendancy.

As a non-American, but one who worked in US companies for decades, I feel Americans are influenced by economic gigantism.

The American experience is of triumphing with audacious, go big or go home schemes that others wouldn't or couldn't attempt.

To cherry pick one example, during WWII the US created airstrips on tiny pacific islands to fight the Japanese. Few people imagined it was possible to freight in the bulldozers, machines and materials to accomplish this, and it was game changing.

And of course we have the Manhattan project. Railroads. Gigantic IT companies like Oracle, IBM, Apple and more lately Google.

These successes fed into American exceptionalism.

This has its pros and cons.

In a world on the cusp of incredible discoveries, it let audacious American megacorps capture the high ground.

But many people have had the experience of starting work at US Megacorp and being astonished at the waste, ineptitude and back stabbing that happens - yet somehow the corporate continues to thrive and throw off mountains of money. The experience of that easy money breeds an unhealthy version of American exceptionalism where people start to believe they will and should succeed - just because American.

Things are different elsewhere in the world. Up and comers make do with what they have and struggle upwards while the USA cruises.

Just one example are the thriving Chinese fabbing companies like JLCPCB. Any two man upstart tech company use their online tools to design a PCB, then have their factory fabricate the board, solder on all the components and connectors, and receive it by post a few days later. What would have cost thousands of dollars, taken months and required a team of experts a few years ago now takes days and costs a few bucks.

It's pretty obvious now that PCB manufacture is an absolute core competency in tech going forward, yet the US is nowhere in this industry. The only US competitors seem stuck in a local minimum where they get assured business at generous prices from security-sensitive govt agencies who can't outsource to China, but they can't remotely compete on price with their Chinese competitors on price or even quality and timeliness.

I feel this is true of Americans and Europeans. And as an American, I've been migrating myself more and more into the European mindset. I put in my 8 hours, and I'm done, then I do non-work related activities for the next 8 hours, then I sleep for the next.

Regarding your last point, back when my political views were "evolving", I had thought about if, instead of handing foreigners diplomas and kicking them out of the country as fast as possible, we should do the opposite: have student visas require that the recipient stay in the US at least five years after graduation, and then fast-track them through the permanent residency -> citizenship pipeline. It made no sense to me why we'd educate someone to get a degree in chemical engineering, possibly from a rival nation, and then send them back to where they came from. We should "brain drain" other countries, not the other way around.

Show me these magical cities where an extra $750/mo in rent lets you both move from the suburbs to downtown, and increase your sq footage!

Diversity is just short hand for US needs to brain drain from around the world, the success is system that disproportionaly increase size of US skilled workforce vs rest, so people better play nice with each other (worked well until not). When PRC went from making 1% of of global technical talent to 50%, and able to retain them or in this case redrain them, they win talent game for generations (at least until 2070s). They will output more stem in next 20 years than US will increase population, births + immigration, i.e. their technical workforce will be 2-3x US. "Diversity" can't brain drain enough to make a dent on those ratios.

"diversity" is an overbroad concept that covers many disparate social practices, a lot of which have nothing to do with technological progress.

I guess that the more focused question is whether China needs to import some amount of tech talent to succeed, at least temporarily. The reporting on this EUV prototype does suggest that that is what they did, giving foreign researchers special visas and whatnot.

Long term is after you and I die, before that they'll reap the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history that can put everyone else in a bad place long term first.

Which developed country doesn’t have a demographics problem?

It's always felt pretty intuitive to me that shared goals in a culture should have some real effect on outcomes.

It doesn't mean absolutely everyone takes part, of course, but it does mean it's a 'thing' that people may take part in with support from many of those around them if they choose.

Looking at the inverse: If you're going against the cultural wind, you're just going to have a much harder time doing whatever it is.

It just seems like this must show up in outcomes, it would be strange if it didn't.