China and Russia are leading a gradual transition away from reliance on the West and its technologies. If successful, the West's influence around the world will most certainly decline as countries realize that they don't need to accept Western conditions for development, that they can successfully solve the technical challenges themselves or with the help of countries outside of the West.
There are opportunities there to build a new world, but only if we get away from the idea that global supply chains should have a bottle neck like the US that decides who thrives and who fails. That's the essence of Western power as it exists today - and great powers naturally resent it. But they won't be quick to jump onto a Chinese version of the same system, either - ie one in which China can use sanctions to determine who thrives and who fails.
This is why I've always believed that the key to rallying the Global South against Western hegemony is not for China to "replace" the US in the global hierarchy, but rather, to do away with the global reliance on the West by building supply chains that do not have bottle necks or kill switches.
Helping countries develop their own technologies, and building an open source scientific & technological global community, is where salvation lies. This is not say that China should give away its inventions, but it is to say that the approach should be different than the West's, which has been to try and weaponize their inventions through restrictive patents, embargoes, and sanctions.
China would do well to help other countries in the Global South develop the ability to innovate, and to bring them into a common community of shared innovation that cannot be controlled by the West.
