I think what you are mentioning is almost overwhelming power which no country is likely to achieve. If USSR, despite being such a behemoth couldn't achieve the level of hard power required to totally bring along Finland's submission and total adherence, then I don't think anyone can do that.
The USSR is only a behemoth in barren frozen land. The population and economy were very small compared to the US and they lost the technological competition. Other than natural energy, the USSR was a midget compared to modern China in the power it commands and the challenge it poses to Western dominance.
Let's just say that there is a trade off between hard power and soft power.
That sentence right there already makes no sense. They do not conflict, rather the more dominant your hard power the easier it is to grow soft power, making it actually a nonviolent and cultural extension of hard power rather than any "soft" power at all.
Yes having insanely high hard power over anyone will ultimately lead to their acquiescence, however having some soft power - cultural, narrative, entertainment, political/legal, discourse, all of this decreases the burden that the hard power needs to take.
Soft power follows hard power; when you rule, people will want to find excuses everywhere to be happy with your rule because not doing so means they must live their lived in misery. Hence, they enamour themselves with your culture, the same culture they would ignore if you were weak and ridicule if you were a rival. So... it is not actually any soft power but a non-violent extension of hard power.
But that's not always been the case. Even small countries faced with incredible powers have fought back. Afghanistan vs USSR, Afghanistan vs US (this time they didn't even have that much external support), Vietnam vs France/US, Finland vs USSR, Cuba vs US.
It actually has nothing to do with any soft power because it fails to explain why this aura of soft power fails to apply to all nations, or at least similarly situation nations, in the same way. This is due to cultural differences within the country. My statement is the norm, and is usually the case. It is common to the extent that no examples need to be made or there would be too many cases. However, yours is very rare, only a handful of examples in the world. Just like there is a crazy/abnormal person out of every group, there are crazy countries with their own unique and rare reasons to behave illogically. To focus on the outliers and exceptions rather than the norm will miss the forest for the trees.
Responding to these together. I think there's been a misunderstanding here.
I am not claiming that publication in Nature/Science (flagship journals) is the only or even the most important metric to account for. In fact, these don't even publish engineering usually.
OK
My point was that from my personal experience, highly talented Chinese students (in top universities) still stay back in the US.
And the data I gave already proved this incorrect. The fact that China rises much faster than the US proves this incorrect. The Thousand Talents program was instituted to make this incorrect.
I gave the Nature publications as an evidence and then manually compiled all first authors in one month worth of Nature papers.
That doesn't serve as any kind of evidence in a logical way.
Now obviously there's been tremendous Chinese progress in many areas, and in many places they have definitely left the US behind. However, every strata of quality has its use. While China is dominant in the very good (probably top 1%) science/engineering papers, the breakthroughs (that is probably the top 0.01% papers) are still produced by US based researchers.
Up past a certain point, it is erroneous to continue to assume that the higher the journal ranking, the better the research. As a matter of fact, because these journals are American and many in the top 1% Western, there is further bias against China that should be considered. And of course, the actual most useful progress is not published, but quietly and secretly used. That's why Chinese progress is by far the fastest. The gains in the 1% that exceed the US are just the tip of the iceberg.
In my own field for example, while Chinese research is top notch, the most genuine breakthroughs in the field, like the transformers paper, AlexNet paper, ResNet paper, Word2Vec were all in the US. This is a fact, and it is not even debatable. I have heard similar things from people in biology.
There are many fields where China is ahead of the US, peer with the US, and catching up to the US. There is no reason to believe that the competition is over and the US is defeated.
1. Despite what you see in your field, it's basically written on the walls at this point that the US has no chance to keep pace with China in the tech war and even with the recruitment of all its henchmen, it's unlikely to make a difference in the end.
2. What is the purpose of your statement, to note that the US is still top in some areas of research? How does this pertain to the demographics discussion?
