[kore]

The Chinese government's R&D initiatives are what's making the difference here. They've further laid out specific goals for particular technologies such as automated vehicles, drones, medical diagnosis, and machine translation, and their rate of R&D spend is on pace to overtake the US in the coming years.

For all its faults, their leadership has their eyes properly set on science and technology as a means to challenge the US economically and militarily. They're incentivizing the proper areas where they want industry to operate, and are better poised to take advantage of it. The US government is hampered by dysfunction in comparison.

Would hope the US sees what's at risk here, and moves from underestimating the threat, to overestimating it and taking massive action as they often do.

Better summary here: https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/coming-tech-war-china