I mean, american people is as intelligent as anyone else. By the sheer number, is not rare to think that they should have more people of high training on difficult areas to master.
What happens to the US is that they "borrow" a lot of intellectual capacity from abroad, and they have been doing that for a lot of time.
Also, stealing IP and resources has been the eternal strategy of empires to build themselves, US and Europe included.
Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries? That is their entire MO. The Chinese are also responsible for $200-600 Billion worth of IP theft against the US every year.
They will do whatever it takes to make China #1 and see nothing wrong with doing this.
> Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries?
Or you do both. Start from the point of known technologies and reverse engineering and improve from there. China bootstrapped their high-tech industry with not just spying, but also licensing technology, join-ventures, training students/employees abroad and then bringing them back as experienced researchers/engineers. No need to start from first-principles. Plus even when you do have tech-specs on something, that doesn't mean you know how to manufacture it, or it may need modification to address broader system tradeoffs.
If you start from behind and are trying to execute from first principals you'll usually lag behind too just because you have to relearn all the things countries like the US did on your own.
I guess the modern equivalent of that would be espionage which afaik China has not been shy about executing. Operation Paperclip was somewhat of a fluke historically speaking for the explosion of nation-less (ish) scientists. The next one in rocketry would have been the fall of the USSR I guess.
You got this very wrong. Read up Art of War written before Jesus. Espionage is a very important chapter. Americans are rather weak academic these days. You go to any American university and see how many "Asians" there. You will find a lot of Chinese. It is common for Americans not able to speak English well or just English. It is very uncommon not to find Chinese that can read and write Chinese AND English. There are about 4x more Chinese than Americans population. You do the math, one society has more people and higher ratio of hardworking people and very educated vs Americans that twerks more on TikTok (which is an app by China....and possibly Chinese Military). Heck even westerner GoT series are written based on Chinese history. Look up war of seven princes and Cersei equivalent during Jin dynasty. Americans themselves stoled Nazi Germany tech too. USA days are very numbered (this is foretold in many Eastern prophecies even those in Russia). The great west superpower will get destroyed very similar to Atlantis (perhaps explosion of Yellowstone volcabic activities) mentioned in many of these prophecies.
I think that's unlikely, Yellowstone is monitored and I think it's more likely that US programs to prevent population decline/demographic collapse would work than Chinese programs of the same nature. I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers), even if you think the current official figures are real. Russia has massive HIV rates and is shipping a not insignificant portion of it's reproduction age males to Ukraine, and that's not good for it population in general, and may be catastrophic for it's more rural populations.
> I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers)
99.99% of china’s migrant workers are Chinese. I don’t understand what not including migrant workers gives you unless you assume china will import labor from other countries someday?
The problem is that Chinese mentality results in corruption, denialism and other attributes what makes working on R&D almost impossible. For that you need free minds, room for mistakes, no strong hiarchy. All things you won't find in China.
So how did they manage to complete this space station at all when R&D is 'almost impossible'? There is no doubt that China did not develop everything from the ground up, but to disregard the progress that they have made on top of existing technologies is rather shortsighted and disingenuous.
What happens to the US is that they "borrow" a lot of intellectual capacity from abroad, and they have been doing that for a lot of time.
Also, stealing IP and resources has been the eternal strategy of empires to build themselves, US and Europe included.