Got it.
Our systems are going to collapse before long and China will be ready to take the reigns.
On one level absolutely yes, however best interest can sometimes mean co-operating and taking it in the shorts here for a win over there - this is largely how western countries have traded amongst each other.
The Chinese government is much less willing to play the co-operate and we all benefit game which results in other governments having to adjust to that.
It's somewhat similar to what Russia did with their technology industry over the last 10-15 years.
Can be defended as rational from the Chinese viewpoint since they I think are planning over the long term (decades) to forge enough relationships outside of the west to be completely self-sufficient (that has been their goal for a long time in terms of technology IP, they don't just want to be the factory, they want to be the design bureau)
It does seem like the world is polarising around new nexuses of power, the traditional west with the US on one side, China and it's allies (some would say debtors) on the other and the EU somewhere in the middle but much closer to the US than China.
Where it gets interesting is historically those power blocs have formed where the world was much less interconnected than now and so I think that'll change things in ways we can't expect.
COVID has been an interesting lesson in disruption on a global scale (even if compared to how bad it could have been and it was truly awful - it was comparitively minor) and how fast things fall apart, throw in climate change and we are headed for interesting times.
As long as the USA keeps blockades on European companies selling to China whilst doling out exemptions to US companies, expect that balance to shift.
What the US - and others, see my related comment about my own country (Germany) in this sub-thread - was not "questionable" at all. Instead, the way we defend "IP" today is what is questionable.
You won't find the equivalent of a law of physics to support either hypothesis, in the end those are different paths for society to take and it's a choice. I'M presupposing here that there is no end goal for humanity, so there is no obvious way to weigh the different outcomes by some higher level objective measure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History
> The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufactures had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry