There's two kinds of technological progress: in depth and in breadth. A country advances in depth by pouring lots of resources into very expensive facilities t

There's two kinds of technological progress: in depth and in breadth. A country advances in depth by pouring lots of resources into very expensive facilities the likes of which might only exist a few times on Earth in order to make breakthroughs at the frontier of knowledge. I guess a "chip equipment R&D center" counts in this category. A country advances in breadth by diffusing technology so widely it affects the life of basically everyone. When people talk about "welcoming another billion+ humans into living in an advanced industrial society" I think this is what they're imagining. Advances in depth get easier with a larger population, because it increases the total resources available for megaprojects. Advances in breadth get harder because so many more people need to be covered. I think comparisons that put China technologically ahead of Western industrialized nations are confusing depth for breadth. For example, the International Federation of Robotics has a ranking of countries by ratio of robots to manufacturing workers https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race-korea-singapore-and-germany-in-the-lead https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race... where China is in fifth place after Korea, Singapore, Germany and Japan. But then down below, they say that China has "a huge workforce of roughly 38 million people in the manufacturing industry" – in a country of more than a billion people, that number is clearly off by an order of magnitude. I guess they're excluding a lot of low-tech manufacturing that employs the vast majority of workers. So the comparison is only relevant for a small sliver of the population.