And the lack of confidence as demonstrated by @Annihilation98 is also a reason why Chinese are behind.
If you start with a losing/pessimistic mindset you will never succeed in the tech world. Probably won’t live a good life either.
Lack of confidence among East Asian people is one of the biggest issues. That and conformity, and historical lack of risk-taking.
If those 3 things can be resolved (or maybe they are all one thing essentially) then China alone should be able to be more innovative than the rest of the world combined. Assuming those things are resolved, I think it's expected to eventually be the case.
US lead is bigger than the US economic size and technical know-how unfortunately due to their ability to leverage their slave-states in Europe excl. Russia/Belarus (+550 million people) as well as Taiwan, S. Korea, Japan (+200 million people), and Anglo offshoots (+69 million people). All these places have large sources of not just capital but technical know-how too, and on top of that they are all brain-draining 3rd world countries and China especially.
So unless these alliances change China is really up against not just 331 million Americans, in total 400 million Anglo nations +200 million East Asian white-worship states +550 million European slave-states.
China is up against 1.15 billion people, and those also leverage the global talent pool of the highest IQ, most creative risk-takers that come from any country or people that want to get rich. Brain drain might reverse soon, especially for China, but the smartest Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, Persians, Indians, etc. will still choose to move there.
For those talking up China reducing population to 700 million or even 400 million, I can promise you the CCP is not this stupid. It will never happen.