The Chinese education system is certainly not MUCH better than the one in the US. It is in fact terrible.
China is just enormous. Over 1500 million people(officially 1200 million), 4x, 5x times more than the US.
Lots of Chinese people are just very intelligent, just simple math tells you there is 4x 5x more intelligent people in China than in the US.
The math does not work because most brilliant people in China go to the States, as their quality of life increases. But they love their country.
The world is changing because most of the world population lives in Asia, just taking into account Indonesia and India.
What the US are doing is just reacting to this fact, they just want to maintain their hegemonic power in the world, like any other empire that came before.