I think your comment is valuable and insightful, but

> China is demanding more.

I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.

> Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.

And if I show you official statistics you will say statistics out of China can’t be trusted.

Folks like yourself will only realise when it’s too late

The PRC is lapping us in everything from solar panels to electric cars to broad-based robotics and AI in real goods heavy industry.

Their power grid runs at a huge margin of excess capacity and they easily bring more online because they can still do infrastructure projects.

They are rapidly overtaking the United States in domestic, sovereign, and secure semiconductor fabrication. They're a couple of nodes behind but Kirin SoCs and multi-terraweight LLM inference on Aspire look pretty hot shit to me and no one can yank them around like a dog on a leash that it'll get turned off.

Government is dramatically more participatory than the western caricature. It is substantially at the local and regional level that it is directly participatory (so, the size of the whole US). At the very top it is representative in the sense that a party guy in Beijing is considered incompetent (they care about that) if the needs of the region are not on the agenda. When's the last time you called your congressman and got change?

Innovation is plural, research is open, the university system is in the loop, the public benefits.

Real wages are going up.

The PRC gets jumped in with Putin's Kremlin by lazy Americans who don't talk to Chinese people.

It's not the Kremlin. It's JFK in a Chairman Mao hat.