[impossiblefork]

Manufacturing today is industrial automation, mechanical engineering, etc.

If you want to build it you need capital and a large mass of competent people. China has 4x your population, so if you are to do that match them in the number of people who can come up with a concept for a factory and implement it.

You have no chance without transforming your society. You can't match them and have all this inefficient industry with middle-men and insurance companies, local hospital monopolies, local food monopolies, etc. If you are to have any chance all of that has to go away. You can't have people doing things that don't matter, you have to educate everyone you have, from the earliest education to the later stages to get them to a much higher level of capability than they are at today. You can't waste people on being hungry or not having a tutor.

If you are wasting people on being hungry, not having a tutor, in inefficient middle-men industries, etc. the China will simply steamroll you by being as many as you and us Europeans together even after a population halving and by maintaining their current competence level.