> Whenever this discussion pops up it reeks of racism. People from China aren't less intelligent than people in Germany or in the US so with time and more money they will with 100% certainty overcome any technological gap. Sure they are behind in some areas but pretending they can't make a pen is disingenuous.
It's not disingenous and it's not racist as I've laid it out. Facts are facts. I've never discounted the fact that China can't make electronics or that it can't, as a nation state, build satellites. What it's manufacturing sector, the bulk of China's financial success couldn't do was make a ball point pen as it requires precision manufacturing. That was not in China's wheelhouse until 2017. There are countries that excel in precision manufacturing at scale. You're conflating some very macro things.
> China has in a very short time-span gone from mostly agriculture to being in the top three in many (most?) high tech areas.
Define "high tech". The top 5 chip manufacturers in the world are: AMD (US), Intel (US), Broadcom (US), TSMC (CN --> Taiwan), NVidia (US). I'm curious if that helps you understand, better, what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about run of the mill electronics manufacturers. If you round out the top 12 - China isn't there: STM, NXP, Micron, LRC, Applied Materials, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm - none of which are Chinese corporations. These are the companies that know how to build chips. Where is China in this mix? Because these are the companies you need to build high-tech things. Putting an iPhone together is not the same thing as building the chips in them.
> But in short can you explain why the US is using insane amounts of energy to slow down China if they are so totally incapable? Why do we need a completely new doctrine and pivot of the navy to be sailing around an utterly incapable and un-concerning China?
Yes. TSMC. They are the dominant, mass volume, manufacturer of these chips today. The US supply chain relies on this right now. Chip building isn't like retail where you can throw up a store in a few weeks and are off to the races. Building what TSMC has takes time. The US is buying time. That's why you slow China down and keep the issue of Taiwan at bay.
