Technology

While it is definitely true that China puts a lot of questionable electronics into the world, it is still a country with a huge amount of 'independent' tech researchers. Independent in the sense that they pretty much have to keep it all within Chinese circles.

If you compare it to South Korea, they are on the forefront of certain mainstay innovation tracks by cooperating narrowly with researchers from their target demographic, like the United States. The Chinese don't have that luxury, yet they are conducting the research by buying products from Japan, the US, Korea and Europe, deconstructing and then reconstructing them. For Europe and the US, this is highly illegal due to patent law.

Thing is, though: there are loads of brilliant Chinese people due to its sheer size. It's a numbers game, if you have a 1bn population, the top of the line folks are going to be numerous. Most of them get their education somewhere outside China and then bring all the knowledge back to their own unis and companies.

It's really no surprise China has made one of the best electric car, how a company like Xiaomi is present virtually everywhere and Huawei got so far, the US and Europe really had to take a good look if their tech wasn't just a massive spy program. Tencent is so huge, most telco and gaming companies have some collaboration with it. ByteDance is the supplier of the number one spyware app ever with over a billion users worldwide who are happy to provide them with tons of data.

This is without even mentioning that most of your electronics are made in China anyway, which has given them the edge of seeing exactly how the sausage is made, sausage in this case being lithium batteries. They have figured out long ago that if they can become the sole supplier of batteries, they will be in all devices around the world. They have been keeping an eye on Africa to get a foothold in the lithium mines and they have figured out cobalt is the difficult part. They don't really care about the toxicity and the child labour, but the scarcity and mining difficulties are a concern. So they tried to replace it with all kinds of materials and sulfur seems to be a very promising alternative, and it is as abundant and easy as sand.

The Chinese know what they're doing and if not for our ideological differences, they could have easily surpassed the United States as the de facto power that everyone follows blindly.