> I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
The media to this day portrays China as if it was 80s. Yes, at that time it was an open-air manufacturing plant. You can run rudimentary floor operations with high school educated workers, but you still need trained engineers and managers to run the operations. Exporting engineers quickly became impractical, which led to local engineers getting trained. At some point the training became the bottleneck so local educators were trained. And so on.
Over the years, China has built the entire industrial pipeline: all the way from education and vocational training, to scientific research, to local engineering houses. Remember, the people who built Shenzen are now retired. Or to put it into perspective, China is currently at roughly similar age of industrial boom as post-WWII USA was in... the late 90s - early 00s.
"The West" had a head start with regards to IP and China is indeed fighting an uphill battle there, but they have a huge domestic market to grow the companies out. The proud "Designed in X, made in China" things are being replaced with white-label "made in China", where "designed in China" is implied.
Do you have a robot vacuum? It's probably Roborock / Dreame / Ecovacs, not even some western branding.