Your comment seems rooted in fear and anger.

Americas technological domination was based in the fact it was the largest rich country for the last hundred years. That’s it. Just raw statistics.

Now China has a middle class as large as the US population, and continues to bring people into that class.

With triple the US population Chinese dominance is certain. Not by nefarious means, it’s just statistics. There is nothing special about Americans. There is nothing special about the Chinese. It’s just the more well educated people you have the better you will do.

China also benefits from efficiency. America wastes people and resources duplicating work and trying to protect companies from competition. Just the excess of lawyers can be considered a drain on the country. So many could contribute more in other fields.

As long as China keeps trying they will win. Big beats small.

Germany was the intellectual world leader until WW2 and the US only outperformed Germany in terms of Nobel Prizes in the 21st century. Many of Americas flagship technologies were built by German born and educated immigrants.

Americas anti immigration stance is accelerating American decline. The US has always drawn the world’s best via access and funding. Without that America can only rely on home grown talent and that is a huge disadvantage due to the way American schools are structured.

As a non-American, I think that Americans are special in that they have the right combination of hard work and personal initiative and efficiency. To oversimplify, Europeans are efficient workers, but unlike Americans, they use their efficiency not to produce more but to work less and enjoy life. East Asians are hard workers but they tend to favor group cohesion over maximizing individual potential, which is not as efficient.

I am not saying that one culture is better than another, but I think the American way is particularly productive, particularly stressful too.

> Your comment seems rooted in fear and anger.

It's rooted in neither. Care to explain why you came to that conclusion? Fyi I'm neither American nor Chinese.

I was replying to a commenter who used "how we approach everything" and "Chinese way of thinking" when explaining China's economic dominance. I was questioning whether there is any such "national thinking" in any society, still less in a society of ~1.4bn people.

Fwiw I think that China's achievement, since the mid 20th century, of lifting so many people out of extreme poverty in such a short time is extremely creditable. As is its recent action on deploying clean energy technology. I'm much less impressed with its authoritarian political system. And of course I worry about military conflict.

China is in a bad place long-term with an inevitable population decline.

You’re not addressing the parent’s question about how any of this is about the “Chinese way of thinking”. In fact, in offering a purely material explanation for China’s success, that it simply has more people and resources, you’re actively arguing against the idea.

I think the places where American inefficiency is most visible is in construction, urban planning, and healthcare.

America blows a significant amount of its money by having its citizens drive everywhere with no option to take a train, bus, bicycle, or low-speed e-scooter. Americans take a crazy percentage of their income and just dump it into the stagnant automotive industry. Americans blow between $5,000-10,000 a year on transportation. It’s so crazy that there is a pretty long list of American cities where moving from the suburbs to the most walkable part of the metro area of that city will net you more square footage in your dwelling after removing the $750/month expense of owning a personal vehicle.

Then you can’t even really fix this problem in America because construction costs are wildly inflated. China can build a high speed rail network for the entire country for the price of a handful of miles of subway in manhattan. Projects take an insanely long time, e.g., California high speed rail. Multiple US cities have a housing cost crisis because houses aren’t being built fast enough, and that’s more money in the economy being blown on rent and financial products rather than productive endeavors.

Hangzhou metro has 12 subway lines. In 2014 they only had one.

Finally, healthcare. America just blows double the amount of money on healthcare of the next most expensive country, with worse outcomes in part because they sit in their cars all day.

I don’t even think some of the problems you’ve brought up with America like the school system are as big of problems. America has really good public schools and universities, so good that Chinese people still come to the US to get educated en masse, even at pretty standard and average state schools.

The current government doing stupid shit like discouraging research and immigration is certainly not helping though.

So some or even many people explain America’s success as a result of diversity. If that’s true then either China will need to import a diverse population (axis of diversity is uncertain), or else diversity is irrelevant and they will succeed as a more or less undiverse population (whether people are actually Han doesn’t matter so long as they believe and the government classifies them as Han). It’ll be interesting to see.