Skilled job supply: labour supply is definitely issue, and there is theoretical ceilling on how much high skilled technical jobs there can be. But PRC only country with talent glut, vs everyone else projected shortage. That automatically gives them both strategic and economic advantage (unlimited cheap high end labour). And part of the shortage (i.e. source of youth unemployment) is simply they spammed academia harder than industry. real estate to industry pivot lagged academia machine going brrrt by 10 years. Industry is going brrrt now, but will still take time to generate 10s of millions of high end jobs, which btw will simultaenously erode western high end. Every industry where western incumbants gets displaced by more efficient PRC players basically lose significant portion of their operating profits and downsize.
>be stuck on the hard problem
They are manifestly not. They have been brutally accelerating / demolishing / catching up / and recently leading. Look at actual timeline, bulk of tertiary talent generation is post 2000s academic reforms (add 10-15year masters+industry pipeline), they didn't explode academic system and talent output until ~2010s, bulk of new talent + a few years for cohorts to integrate into and simultaneously expanding high end industry = almost all the high end catchup was done in the last 10 years shortly after workforce composition STARTED STEM/skilled shift. And most of that catch was done when PRC was growing from 20m-40m STEM, i.e. from half US STEM to parity, and exploding before it reached parity due to PRC industry cluster advantages.
Like the amount of progress/catchup they have made across every sector relative to execution time is objectively stupendendous, as in historic outlier tier, and now they're leading/frontier in various sectors, which already invalids they can only fast follow. They're simply not retarded with industrial policy until coldwar 2.0 that forced them to decide to indigenize everything and that was 7 years ago, they're pretty much caught up in nearly everything except the absolute pinacle, and even then they seem to be beating western projected catchup timeline (see today's Chinese EUV prototype report).
This all happened in basically 10 years, when PRC cultivated pool for mid-career professionsals in 2010s from 2000s tertiary reforms. They will have conservatively 50 years and 2x-3x larger skilled workforce and much larger/developed industrial base going forward, i.e. OCED combined, but not paper workforce, workforce with actual access to the densest and most complete industrial chain in the world brrrting at PRC speed.
IMO this is talent/industrial base advantage that is as insurmountable as US WW2 advantage that sealed US hegemony for 50+ years. Like even if US AGIs first cope strategy is true, LBH, said AGI is going to look at the numbers, the industrial chain density, the sheer abundance of power and abillity to generate atoms, and immediately defect to PRC.
Even if you wanted to, you cannot bring the majority of your population to a high-skill level. That's not surprising, but still it is debatable whether China is producing value in line with their large, highly skilled cohort. They seem to be stuck on the hard problem, relying a lot on the import of foreign-invented technologies. That may change over time; we will see…