This sounds like official Chinese propaganda. This was truer at some point, but things have started turning bad for China with the advent of Xi Jinping. 20-25 years ago, the country was hopeful, developing fast, opening up. Foreigners started moving there, seeing it as a new land of opportunity. Much of that is gone. The economy is in bad shape, youth unemployment is massive, the country is a dictatorship, nobody wants to move there (and China doesn't want you to anyway). I'll quote the Economist: "When Mr Xi took over in 2012, China was changing fast. The middle class was growing, private firms were booming and citizens were connecting on social media. A different leader might have seen these as opportunities. Mr Xi saw only threats."
Go to any top-N American University, pick a random STEM faculty and count the number of Chinese (nationality) post-grads, post-docs and faculty. Alternatively, look at the trajectory of science publications coming out of Chinese universities vs the US. Underestimating China's brain-trust is doing oneself a disservice.
I don't need to be convinced that China has lots of bright, hard-working individuals. I just want to point out that China faces immense challenges and that we should see beyond, and push back against, the propaganda. There is a massive asymmetry between China and democratic nations in this regards.
This is a fair assessment. However, I think there is propaganda or self-delusion in the west that leads some people to believe that free markets and/or democracy are preconditions for any number of desirable outcomes like creativity, economic success, product innovation, etc. That may have empirically been true against the Eastern Bloc/Soviet Union during the cold war, but is not obvious to me regarding China today. AFAICT, China has produced companies that can go to to toe with the best in the west - occasionally winning outright[1]. We can argue whether that's because of subsidies, espionage, innovation or fundamental research
