China still seems to be mostly in a catching up and copying phase.
Not to say their accomplishments are anything but impressive. But look at the space station they’re building. Impressive achievement, but a fairly conservative design. Meanwhile the US has worked on inflatable space station modules, and it seems like that USA will make commercial space stations well before China.
For what I’ve seen USA has far more innovate designs in the works for rocket engines, rockets, spacecraft, space planes, space stations, satellites, etc.
There are impressive innovations from China too, in the space of quad copters, solar power, robot vacuums, EVs, etc. But all-in-all it feels to me that their advanced innovations from all of China isn’t much beyond what we see from much smaller countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Not that amazing considering their population size.
Their population is now shrinking, the economy is getting worse, they have an insane level of debt (especially when including shadow banking), they don’t do real immigration, they’re getting more hostile to expats, they have some brain drain, ... I suspect we’re seeing peak China.