To me the whole thing reads like armchair politics+economics. There's a lot of rehashing the old 'glory days' of the cold war with the Soviet Union and trying

To me the whole thing reads like armchair politics+economics. There's a lot of rehashing the old 'glory days' of the cold war with the Soviet Union and trying to apply that to modern China, while explicitly acknowledging that they collectively have no clue about modern China (the discussion about factions and Xi). It seems that the conference speakers really wish the U.S. was the very best at everything and believe it deserves to be but the cognitive dissonance is apparent, as you point out in the case of state/capital fusion. Another that stands out is confusion about why the U.S. isn't a leader in semiconductor manufacturing any more, apparently boiling down to the risk of IP theft (which makes no sense from a fabrication perspective). The worry about how many Chinese students are in the U.S. is just sad. The U.S. was only ever exceptional in its efforts to be the melting pot that attracts immigrants, to the limited extent that it did. I'd be quite worried and looking to emigrate if we didn't have a ton of foreign students. Is it even a reasonable goal in the modern era to achieve or maintain technological superiority in any localized region? That seems to be what the conference is hoping for.