The US does have a great innovation-oriented culture but much of it stems from continual immigration of brilliant people from all over the world as well as bein

The US does have a great innovation-oriented culture but much of it stems from continual immigration of brilliant people from all over the world as well as being the largest single market with largely uniform culture and language, which greatly helps with the scaling of large enterprises. China's domestic market is coming close to the US size and arguably larger in PPP terms which matters more than in dollars since the costs for R&D are often dominated by domestic salary. Anyone knowledgeable about Chinese domestic market will attest to its vitality and bustling competitive spirits, not to mention intense work ethics that results in rapid experimentation and iteration. The US continues to lead in breakthroughs but rollouts of innovation happen faster in the Chinese market. With more funding and resources, China also starts to lead in fields they focus on including quantum communications, some areas in AI, and a few other engineering fields. What is clearly lacking for the US is solid education in mathematics. This deficiency leaves the majority of population behind most peers in the developed world. The gap behind East Asian nations including China is especially acute as shown by the PISA result. The gap in math between US and participating Chinese provinces (200+ million population) in PISA 2015 is about 0.6 SD, or roughly comparable to students with 2.7 vs 3.3 GPA. The US needs to expend more effort to attract the best people in the world while pushing ahead with education reforms. The latter takes over a decade to bear fruits, however, so attracting and retaining global innovators should be a key current priority. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_...