It’s notable that China did not adopt the same policy during the period you are associating with their rise. Indeed, they’ve taken the opposite stance in recent years and (now that they have stolen American IP) have moved to seize control of assets and expel the superfluous foreigners.
There is a lesson to be learned there, but it’s contrary to the argument you are trying to make.
Dream on ...
Preventing that could have been prevented in the 70s, 80s, 90s by stopping offshoring, blocking student visas, and prosecuting IP theft.
It is not possible to keep core IP secret. HN folks, of all people, should know this. Anything that thousands of people know is de facto public knowledge.
Talent is proportional to population, but that only matters if society and state has the infrastructure to raise that talent up. Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.
>students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector,
which other countries specifically? No other country has a tech sector. It's the US hegemony or the China hegemony.
The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards. So they got Clinton to spend his last days in office lobbying very aggressively for China's inclusion into the WTO.
China had different plans. Keeping the plunderers out (this time) was one of the smartest moves any nation has made in recorded history. Then the same elites slowly pivoted against China, post realizing they wouldn't be allowed to own China. If we can own you, you're our friend; if we can't own you, you're our enemy. And this is quite obviously not a defense of China's human rights record or anything else, that's not the point. China only mattered (in the enemy sense) when the elites realized they were going to be locked on the outside of the rise.
So... Seems that's exactly what they are getting.
I would characterize my recommendations as things that could have been done for the US to not fund or encourage the re-rise of China.
