"Leadership" might not translate fast enough to cash in the US to look as though it's worth having. The US metric up to the last year or so, which I hope is beginning to fade, is "can we make our money back on this in a short time?" and the closure of labs like Bell and Xerox PARC reflect this bottom-line thinking. Germans and Japanese alike see nothing "better" in the challenges of design than in those of manufacturing so they have good engineers doing both, and they think longer-term. It's less difficult to sell the leadership argument to their management. The French don't even appear in the contest and that's because all their bright people - who are legion - are theoreticians, they see something not quite nice, or grubby, or something in manufacturing and manufacturing engineers are seen as lower life-forms. If the French could get over that they might place.

The Chinese won't lead, ever, with stolen IP and that's how they do business. They have advanced recipes but when they break, there is no theoretical backing for it. They'll manufacture things a couple lamellae behind the cutting edge until they get over that. Once the ROW catch on you will see the Chinese doing truly wacky things because they will be stealing poisoned IP.

It ain't the engineering. It's the Chinese penchance for screwing you out of a buck rather than earning it honestly that is going to bite them in the ass. The Chinese can build a good car. One of them. Then they will twiddle and pare and chisel and fuck their suppliers and build backyard factories favored by local politicians instead of qualified ones, and they will engage in foot shots until no one trusts anything that comes out of that country, and they will learn that honest value as delivered is worth more than the initial swag.

Take the Bluesky (PRC brand) toaster oven my GF bought. It came apart in three -months'- usage. We bought a deLonghi toaster oven the next time. Haier washing machines? Look at their ratings. Jinma tractors? Ditto. On and on.... The products are not badly designed, they are badly built out of materials that wouldn't pass a first article inspection, and will be until Chinese business doesn't depend on bribery at every conceivable level to function.

Until that day arrives, buy no Chinese product you have to trust.

Another 50ish ME here.

I worked for Applied Materials when it was busy outsourcing production of 5000 and Centura systems to Japan, in the early 1990s. At that time Silicon Valley was getting full of Japanese companies doing exactly what we're talking about here: buying, cross-licensing, or otherwise co-opting technology. There was - and still is - an AMAT R&D center in Narita where the biggest, nastiest kludge prototypes were being built by local staff. And they learned, and they got better at it....

and the market moved. AMAT is now seeking growth in solar films, not in what was their core business: wafer fab.

AMAT is probably smart enough to keep the cutting-edge tech nuggets the hell out of China. The parent is right about production raising the ante. The parent is wrong in implying that this ipso facto ruins the home business - it only ruins businesses that have gotten complacent. UK car industry? Failed to be paranoid. Ditto UK bicycle industry, American audio industry, American car industry. The American aircraft industry is next and I assure you Boeing are not missing the implications. 757 production -will- be moved to China in ten years or fewer. How will the market move in aircraft?

After all, the UK, France and Germany are still in business. So is the US.

In my current business, labor is a pretty small fraction of the cost of goods sold. As it matures, it will get more cost sensitive and the gains to be had in reducing labor cost will mean this business will move to China.

The question is whether the fuse is built faster than it burns.

Don't discount, above all, the idea that the Chinese are managing their own fuse. If 1.3 billion people demand more than what can be supplied, there you have the necessary conditions for a revolution: they're not started by starving people, they're started by people who see progress but aren't sufficiently sharing in it.

"A dressing of diamond" - it's a poem by a crazy French woman, who was jailed for anarchist agitation IIRC and wound up dying in jail. She had probably never thought of this; kind of sad.

Yup, this is how the power system works in France, except they change gears only once at night (in my area 11pm to 7am is the "heures creuses" where power costs 4 euro cents / kWh vice 8 euro cents / kWh during "heures pleines". The French pinch their centimes until you can see the nail marks, and you better damned bet they take full advantage of this scheme. My water heater (when running electrically, typically during the summer) comes on at 11 pm, and every French appliance I'm aware of has a delayed-start option.