One thing China did which was smart was to start training thousands of engineers about twenty years ago, about 10x the number of US engineering graduates. That's paying off now.

It was also a little sad to see the treatment of Tesla by Biden. It was the world's leading EV company at the time but he excluded from EV get togethers because he wanted the unionised companies like GM to win. I think that sort of thing - protecting mediocre incumbents that contribute to the right politicians didn't help. Musk was a dem at the time but after that flipped to Trump and went a bit off the rails.