David Goldman has an introduction to China “as it is” at Law & Liberty I found interesting. I agree with his observations materially. The TL;DR version is that by virtue of the Chinese language family, the orthography developed to express it, and history China is a natural technocracy. Those are my words not Mr. Goldman’s.
Since the introduction of the imperial examination 2,500 years ago and its modern successor, the Gaokao, the university entrance examination, China has been selecting the experts who will run the country. Here’s a snippet from Mr. Goldman’s piece:
Ambition is the glue that holds the polyglot, ethnically mixed Chinese empire. Napoleon invented the modern mass citizen army, saying that each of his soldiers kept a field marshal’s baton in his rucksack. That is, he awoke the ambition of the downtrodden peasants of France and made them into a force that crushed the professional armies of the European monarchs. The Chinese are more practical than the French. Every Chinese person carries flash cards for the Gaokao, China’s formidable university entrance examination taken by 13.4 million Chinese in 2024. The United States has just 3.8 million graduating high school seniors; I doubt that 5 percent of them could pass the Gaokao. China is a ruthless meritocracy. Top officials and billionaires can buy admission to Harvard for their children, but not to Peking University. For well over two thousand years, academic achievement has been the path to success for the Chinese. It should be no surprise that China now graduates more engineers than the rest of the world combined.
Chinese people are not as too many an American is struggling to get out imagine, “Americana is struggling to get out”. China’s emergent system has strengths and weaknesses. We must deal with China as it is not as we might imagine it to be.
Some organization in Singapore estimates that 8 of the top 10 technological universities in the world are in China, as are a substantial majority of the top 20.
Ron Unz notes that if an IQ of 160 is needed to do cutting edge theoretical physics, then the US has 10,000 such people and China has 300,000, 30 times as many.
China is now the world innovator in nearly all the sciences and technologies.
I began my engineering studies in 1961, and I retired from a major research university in 2007. That span predates the Berkeley Free Speech movement, and goes deep into the Wokeism/DEI movement. During it the content of the typical BS engineering degree was cut by 20 to 25%, all of the cuts being in science, math, and engineering topics. At the same time, academic standards were relaxed significantly. Both those trends accrued to China’s and Russia’s benefit.
Of course, wasting 30 plus years and $8 trillion fighting Muslim militias didn’t help, either. And yhe Deep State/neocons remain in control, and will continue to pursue their delusions, furthering the ongoing wreckage of this country.
Assuming a median IQ of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 points, by my reckoning 160 or above would be four standard deviations or more. That would be .006% of the population or just under 20,000 individuals in the U. S. But your point remains.
Whether that actually provides China with an advantage is another question entirely. There are issues in China which prevent the exercise of originality and innovation. The large percentage of bogus and/or non-original “peer-reviewed” scientific articles emanating from China illustrate that point.