These discussions never seem to mention cultural soft power. Even if China were technologically superior to the US, they simply don’t have the cultural production that the US (and broadly, English-language media) has. American television and movies are known the world over, whereas I can’t name more than a handful of (non-Hong Kong) Chinese books/movies with global reach. I also don’t see Mandarin replacing English as the global default trade language. China would need to make its own NYC and Hollywood to begin to compete with this.
Why is this relevant to tech? Because I think one could argue that many tech companies are built upon this cultural capital; it’s hard to imagine YouTube being successful globally without being the source of a ton of American-made video content.