China already dominates manufacturing without a regime change. They have surpassed "western levels". There's only a few remaining areas that the US still dominates. Those areas include aviation, and JavaScript. The US has basically moved up the stack while China has taken over the entire bottom of the stack.
Maybe the Boeing issues are related to the use of JavaScript in Aviation?
Not really arguing about China being a manufacturing power house but I don't think that was the point that was being made. That part might be compatible with their regime (though arguably not the current regime any more). What would be the top 10 tech/science areas, other than aviation and JavaScript where China has demonstrable leadership over the west?
During Covid we saw mRNA vaccines coming quickly from the west. Including their manufacturing. Semi-conductor manufacturing technology is still led by the west (all the way up and down the stack). Tesla is manufacturing in the west fairly successfully (ofcourse with lots of Chinese parts). In the compute world I can't think of a single technology where China clearly leads. They might be manufacturing a lot of components but they're not the ones innovating/designing. Manufacturing is about cost/scale/momentum and they're still carrying a lot of the investment forward but I don't think the derivative of that is as steep as it was 5-10 years ago.