Yes you did miss the memo, but most of America did. My first awareness came about five years ago through friends who are in (or adjacent to) the HPC space.
What has surprised me most is the difference in awareness and framing between the Chinese and Americans I have spoken with (though obviously "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes").
When I speak with Chinese friends, and contemporaries in tech sectors, many view the current state of US-Chinese economic conflicts in two parts: a trade war and a related-but-separate "tech war". Speaking with Americans, among those who work in the technology sector, less than half see there being a separate "tech war", outside/beyond the context of the tariffs and related trade negotiations.
Outside of tech, no Americans I have spoken to see there being a separate tech war, and it is entirely contextualized in President Trump's current trade war framing.
As for Chinese nationals outside of tech, I have far fewer conversations. I did recently speak with a gentleman from a maritime BRI project in Africa (i.e. very removed from tech). He nonetheless seemed to hold a pride for recent Chinese technological advances as a part of his identity (or personality?) and viewed it as outside/beyond the specific incidentals of the current trade war. He was happy to be working on the BRI, but he thought that it was less important than the technology contest.
My guess is that a lot of it comes down to intentional framing and emphasis in popular news media?
Maybe because people realize that despite this "tech war" that China is apparently winning, Apple still makes the vast majority of profits in the smartphone world, and the vast majority of those profits find their way to the US. Google still.makes the vast majority of OSes installed in the world, followed by Microsoft and Apple, and the money there also largely goes to the US. Intel still makes the vast majority of money in the semi conductor world, and the vast majority of that flows to the US. Their biggest threat is ARM, a British company owned by the Japanese, also an ally and open societies.
American software companies dominate tech and internet in both mindshare and profits throughout the world, excluding China. Despite them "stealing" all this IP.
Sure, the US may not be able to compete in China, but the openness of the US meant that the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa America's were willing to buy their products.
When the US engages in nationalistic trade wars, it loses China's market which was never really available to it. But it also gives Europeans and Asians and Africans an excuse to exclude the US from their markets.
Any country wanting to do that, which I suspect a lot of them will now that Trump has decided he just wants to fight trade wars despite the US being the biggest winner of the current economic system, simply needs to point to the well known American spying to ignore American suppliers and software companies and developers.
The US may come out net better in the relationship with China but it's gonna lose a lot more. (it won't even here...China had been giving America TVs and computers and what not for pieces of paper. If you told an alien this deal they wouldnt believe the US is complaining. The US's problem is entirely that it hasn't been able to distribute this massive wealth surplus it has enjoyed throughout it's society, because it has prioritized the ability of the richest to hoard that wealth to the point they don't even have islands left to buy, instead of providing healthcare to the poorest).
Correct, China may regress further backwards under the new system that Xi has installed (and with the continued tightening down on everything across the board that he is pursuing in the name of absolute control).
Most likely the US will increase its advantage overall during this time, as China's Government puts itself into a straight-jacket along with its most talented people. As opposed to unleashing them in Deng-style with further liberalization.
China can never have a full answer in terms of exports vs the US software juggernaut. That's inherent to their system of extreme government controls and limitations. Why would anybody in the West ever use Baidu, Ctrip, or Chinese equivalents of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Slack, DocuSign, Fortinet, Github, GitLab, Splunk, Twilio, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, et al? There are dozens of booming enterprise companies in the US in that mold, China inherently can't compete with most of them globally. That also goes for the burgeoning software companies in the 'West' outside of the US, such as Atlassian and Shopify (both with $30b market caps). There is a reason why AWS is globally dominant, while China's cloud providers are lagging by five years or more (both in service offerings and sales size) - businesses in the West mostly won't go anywhere near China's cloud services and never will. It's another case of their companies being firewalled inside of China.
To the parent's point re allies, Trump is a mess, however he is gone after one or two terms. US allies generally understand this is a speed bump in a very long-term relationship. Xi's authoritarianism is practically guaranteed to increase by the year for a long time to come. It's going to get worse. Dictatorships become more aggressive and paranoid with time, rather than less.
I agree, without holding their people as slave workers they will not be able to compensate the lack of efficiency in resource allocation in the long run. People are accepting this right now because there is so much progress but if that progress stalls for a couple of years, because of some economic cycle e.g. they might lose their patience. This will be answered with more force/control of the government which in turn kills even more of the efficiency.
In my view this is the most probable scenario but there are also some advantages they have. One I find particularly valuable is that most of its government is constituted of engineers (70% if I remember correctly) vs. in the US most are some sort of Lawyers (?).
It is really interesting how this will play out in the mid/long term. I am kind of bullish on the western countries though they are all (especially here in europe) shooting their own feet by killing their most valuable asset: their free markets.
I don't think engineers have any special insight into running governments, or are even particularly likely to beat lawyers at running governments. I know it's tempting to believe this, given how many of us here are engineers, but I suspect the mentality of lawyers might be better suited to being democratic politicians than engineers and democratic politicians are clearly better suited to running countries than dictators - history is very clear on that point.
What matters in a politician is primarily gathering wisdom from around the population and combining, synthesising it into policy. Reality is complex, nobody can see the big picture, there are millions of factors that can affect any nation-level decision. See it as hand-crafted logic (dictatorship/engineers) vs machine learning (votes/lawyers). Lawyering is likely especially suited to creating decent leaders because the heart of being a (trial) lawyer is debate and being able to represent people who you may not only disagree with, but actively suspect are criminals. You have to do your best to be the devils advocate anyway - which is a good skill to have if your job is or should be primarily implementing the decisions of the electorate.
What has surprised me most is the difference in awareness and framing between the Chinese and Americans I have spoken with (though obviously "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes").
When I speak with Chinese friends, and contemporaries in tech sectors, many view the current state of US-Chinese economic conflicts in two parts: a trade war and a related-but-separate "tech war". Speaking with Americans, among those who work in the technology sector, less than half see there being a separate "tech war", outside/beyond the context of the tariffs and related trade negotiations.
Outside of tech, no Americans I have spoken to see there being a separate tech war, and it is entirely contextualized in President Trump's current trade war framing.
As for Chinese nationals outside of tech, I have far fewer conversations. I did recently speak with a gentleman from a maritime BRI project in Africa (i.e. very removed from tech). He nonetheless seemed to hold a pride for recent Chinese technological advances as a part of his identity (or personality?) and viewed it as outside/beyond the specific incidentals of the current trade war. He was happy to be working on the BRI, but he thought that it was less important than the technology contest.
My guess is that a lot of it comes down to intentional framing and emphasis in popular news media?