Dan Wang has a really thoughtful overview of the state of technology in China in 2019. He does think that the long-term prospects are good for technology in China, but many of the current fears about Chinese domination are hype, as there are still fundamentals that they're missing, like a semiconductor industry.
There's a really good insight in there about the value of intangible process knowledge:
We should think of technology as a living product, which has to be practiced for knowledge even to be maintained at its current level. I offered the example of the Ise Grand Shrine, which Japanese caretakers tear down and rebuild anew every generation so that they don’t lose its production knowledge. Here’s an example I came across more recently: Mother Jones reported in 2009 that the US government forgot how to produce “Fogbank,” a classified material essential to the production of the hydrogen bomb, because relevant experts had retired. The government then had to spend millions of dollars to recover that production knowledge. I believe that the hard-to-measure process knowledge is more important than the more easily observable tools and IP. We would be capable of making few meaningful advancements if a civilization from 2,000 years in the future were able to dump blueprints on us, just as the Pharaohs and Caesars from 2,000 years in the past would have been able to do nothing with the blueprints of today.
Today, Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they engage more than anyone else in the technological learning process. Few Chinese firms are world-leading brands. But workers in China are using the latest tools to manufacture many of the most sophisticated products in the world. They’re capturing the marginal process knowledge, and my hypothesis is that puts them in a better place than anyone else to develop the next technological advancements. To be more concrete, Chinese workers will be able to replicate the mostly-foreign capital equipment they currently use, make more of their own IP, and build globally-competitive final products.
There's just a ton of really interesting passages in that letter. For example:
After the UK imposed export controls on industrial mills in the 18th century, US firms simply hired a few people who memorized their designs. One of them, Samuel Slater, is known as “Slater the Traitor” in the UK and the “father of the US industrial revolution” stateside.
(That was in regard to trying to keep tech secrets from China.)
And a bit about architecture:
like a remark from a friend: Beijing is a city that emanates a sense of sinister power, in a way that Mumbai and Naples also do. They’re each places that have had foreign rule over significant periods, filled with intimidating buildings that have entryways that convey mystery. It’s worth keeping in mind that the city has been sustained through sheer political will; which other major cities can be so far away from a significant river or body of water?