What I think what China needs more of is to fund some group of PHDs on some moonshot project. Just give them near unlimited funding and tell them to go ham. It seems like researchers in China is focused on short term business, well trodden fields or commercial projects, which works out well in the short term and is practical but means that China is missing out on making headway into some revolutionary technology.
Just look at boston dynamics, just a team of a few hundred engineers just working on the same field for decades, they didn't have any products to sell until Spot, so they were bleeding money until then. but their robotic tech is decades ahead of literally everyone else in the industry just because they were able to just spends decades on this one obscure field that no one was paying any attention to because there was no financial reason to develop the technology, being that humanoid robots are so far away. You can see the same thing with shit like mRNA vaccines, EUV, reusable rockets, just well funded small companies or teams of researchers working in some extremely niche areas that basically no one else was doing any research on, with no promise of success, sometimes for decades. But when it pays off, it pays off hard, with them completely dominating the field for more than a decade or more.
Future moonshot fields: artificial organs-grown by pigs or 3D printed, commercial fusion, anti-aging drugs, human level robots, neural brain interfaces, artificial wombs, next gen GMO crops/livestock, gene-edited humans etc etc are all going to be pioneered by the West at this rate. Sure it might take another 1-2 decades for them to become reality and China could catch up quickly, but China is always playing catch up.
