It's okay. As long as they remain a few decades behind us, it is all good.
And what they don’t seem to understand is that it isn’t an IQ(touted all the time by
Chinese internet paid propagandists ) or resources (touted all the time) or industry(touted all the time). It’s culture - plain, out of the box thinking culture which is not part of Chinese society due to the nature of the political system and the educational environment it created in the last century. China may very well have more smarter people than America, more resources, more industrialized and so on. But if the system isn’t focused on innovation of new ideas but renovation of existing ideas then the output will always remain behind.
That isn’t to say there aren’t innovative people or innovative products out of China - but because the culture doesn’t encourage it at large these are outliers and cannot change the status quo as fast as it is done in the US. Those Chinese that are innovating many have backgrounds from US universities (where they do excel and there are many of them) and take that culture back home(but that also becomes a threat to the CCP in some cases).
All the citing of Space Shuttle failures and others simply ignore (as
@Irfan Baloch rightly points out) that these were done 40 years before anyone in China ever did anything similar. I don’t consider it a judgement on the Chinese people because after being oppressed by the British for eons and then starvation the Chinese had barely begun rebuilding knowledge when Mao purged many of their brightest and lost them decades there.
Meanwhile America was busy accepting anyone including runaway Chinese scientists from Mao so long as they were willing to contribute knowledge and advance technology in the military space(and by inference the civilian sector).
I am comfortable saying most “American” ideas aren’t American. Because America is a land of immigrants - its rocketry is began at home but was advanced by Germans(for that matter so did the Russians) , it learned about jet engines from the brits and descendants of immigrants built everything from Infrared sensors to the internet. But that is what makes America unique - it takes in the world… including Chinese who built the American railroad’s foundation and are a part and participle of American life along with people from all over the globe.
In a way, China isn’t competing with America - it is competing with everyone else around and world and its own sons/daughters. So long as America has that character, it will be unbeatable. Russia had the right idea to try and break that social framework by pushing xenophobic ideas through American social networks - that has stalled for now.
So while that 40-50 year gap has been reduced greatly by China to maybe a 10-20 year gap. But it will remain because at the end that new innovation hasn’t come out yet as that culture change still is stymied by the system. It is visible in places like E-hang and other companies that took initial ideas from the west and really made working products around them. It’s visible in the applications of ideas in transportation and infrastructure that were thought up 20 years ago in western universities and think tanks but only really applied and built in China. But that purely Chinese idea - something only China could think of and built is yet to be applied en masse especially in defense.
China’s best weapon against America isn’t the J-20 or a space station - its TikTok and making the next American generation more stupid and obese.