I suppose we'll see in the relatively near future. China is setting themselves up to completely dominate solar in the future. Not only by investing and developi

I suppose we'll see in the relatively near future. China is setting themselves up to completely dominate solar in the future. Not only by investing and developing heavily in their own country but also having the prescience to start doing things like buying up cobalt resources throughout the world -- perhaps inspired by the success of the petro dollar. But their development for now is mostly just one of taking something, refining it, and producing at scale. If they intend to go the whole 9 yards with solar they're going to need to come up with innovative deployment and load balancing solutions that will be first in the world. Similarly with things like electric vehicles, which they're also investing heavily in. Will they simply have the equivalent of 'electric gas stations' everywhere or actually take things to the next level with ideas like wireless as-you-drive charging? And they're also pursuing automation in their factories as wages rise. That in turn will lead to interesting technological, and social, problems. And they've also put forth interest in working on completely revolutionary projects, such as a permanent manned moon base. So I suppose this will be answered in the near future. For now I just don't see any reason to expect them to suddenly fumble. I think you're dramatically underestimating the difficulty of what they're achieving. Like I mentioned in the first post, if their 'secret' was just "espionage, slavery, education" then it makes one wonder why all developing nations (most of which pay far lower wages that China) aren't on their way to becoming a technologically advanced industrial civilizations.