> China is a dirty old dinosaur of an economy, it has double the carbon emissions of the US while only generating 2/3 of the GDP! Horrific carbon intensity. Not to mention all the other environmental destruction it causes. The worker exploitation, the corruption, the human rights abuses, the bullying of its neighbors.
The U.S. produces roughly double the emissions of China per capita. Ignoring population is a gross misrepresentation of the facts. As for bullying neighbours, the U.S. lost both those legs after a long string of funding terrorists, assassinations, and aggressive wars.
> It's modernization strategy consists of copying from the west, and little else innovative, certainly not for its size and wealth. A single American company started less than 20 years ago has already surpassed its entire space program, which sees it losing control of its rockets in orbit and crashing them all over the globe.
Wikipedia has a quote from Alexander Hamilton:
> American founding father and first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton advocated rewarding those bringing "improvements and secrets of extraordinary value" into the United States. This was instrumental in making the United States a haven for industrial spies.
Industrial espionage was how the U.S. caught up to the UK and Europe. All developing countries will try to copy what's already been discovered because it gets you to the point where you can actually start competing on new technology much more quickly than trying to reinvent the wheel.