I believe China will soon withdraw from the world stage to become a hermit kingdom once again. In a hundred years when they open up again, we'll find that they're still using tech from 2022, like an evolved version of RISC-V or Linux. The rest of the world will have moved on.

The same thing happened with Chinese 9 man volleyball, which is actually how the sport was originally created by its American inventor in the late 19th century.

Which is ironically bad for everyone.

If the USA had been cut off from the civilised world in the 1800s, to prevent it stealing industrial technology from Europe, then perhaps Britain would have been a bigger empire for longer and the USA would be just the world's cotton plantation.

But we would be living in world without a lot of the 20th century's inventions. It would be a cool steampunk future though !

Indeed. The US spent most of the nineteenth century stealing patents and copywright (for example the simply stole everything that Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw wrote publishing it without paying the authors a penny and the patent rights they stole were continental scale larceny). It was only when Edison started to come up with some serious innovations/inventions that the US suddenly discovered the joys of IP proctection. Whilst some of the measures they are taking regarding China are based on genuine security concerns a great deal of it is a thinly disguised and very hypocritical trade war.

Its a matter of perspective. They're actually bigger than us and they have more resources. They also make most of the products the world uses. So it could turn out that we become the 'hermit kingdom'.

Exerting secondary control like we do in the US not only requires a large enforcement bureaucracy but also makes our products less attractive. We've enjoyed a significant lead in these products but this lead is being chipped away and once it becomes unimportant then there's no need for a customer to buy and encumbered product when there's a usable free alternative.

I wouldn't worry about 'tech from 2022'. We're still stuck on x86 which is effectively 'tech from 1974' (or 1984 if you want to be a bit kinder). There's nothing wrong with RISC-V, it does the job its intended to do (...and it does it better than ARM....). Its other, potentially completely different, architectures that may diverge. Here who's to say that 'ours' is automatically better than 'theirs'? (Also, 'ix' OS's have stood the test of time because they do the job they're intended to do.....unlike a certain dog's breakfast of code that we call an 'operating system' that's widely used in our society. Again, Linux does the job. Other completely different systems might evolve.....but they most definitely won't be Windows based!)

"...they have more resources. They also make most of the products"

The key word you're missing there is "cheaper". The have cheaper resources and make cheaper products than can be mined / built in other parts of the world. (Mainly due to cheap labour and lax regulations) If China shut up shop tomorrow we would be paying more for everything but there's nothing at all that couldn't be replaced.

No, they've passed that phase of being the ultra-cheap workshop of the world. They've been investing heavily in education and infrastructure and they're now at the point where a lot of the global R&D is partly or totally done in China.

We've been able to avoid facing the inevitable by just saying to ourselves that "they steal all our IP" and "they can't invent anything, they just copy". We used to say exactly the same thing about the Japanese right up to the point where they took down our consumer electronics market and put a huge dent in our car market. The Chinese are major global players and need to be regarded as such; if we ignore them they'll just carry on anyway and since they're constantly establishing friendly relations with nominally non-aligned countries their influence extends far past their borders.

>but there's nothing at all that couldn't be replaced.

Eventually, and at what cost? I don't see Sheffield or Birmingham becoming manufacturing centers. There's no capital (its too impatient, anyway) and the overheads and startup costs are too high.

Prohibiting the sales of advanced products is easy for the US government to do because all it requires is legal power and no investment. Exporters bear the short term cost.

On the other hand, building alternate supply chains, however many laws and and speeches are made, is really, really hard.

Recently dumb slow Iranian drones have decimated Ukrainian power infrastructure in a few short weeks, the most advanced component being off-the-shelf GPS chips manufactured in China. Now imagine what China could do with modified cheap commercial drones manufactured by the tens or hundreds of thousands.

In contrast, there are no real battle ready AI weapons so far - the practical uses are so far mostly about domestic control and China is already the leading user in that field.

Xi is testing out his war time domestic control - simulated with COVID lockdowns - to make sure the state is battle ready. He'll keep his center of mass low when push comes to shove, relying on low end good enough weapons in enormous quantities. China is already food self sufficient, and Russian hydrocarbons ensure a supply of fertilizer and fuel.

There is a long and difficult road ahead for the West, big painful changes. It is a mistake to think of these sanctions as a victorious offensive - actually it is a rushed defensive retreat - like blowing up bridges - as the first step in a very long and painful struggle.