> China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US

China is in this position because of regulations (and technological enforcement of them like GFW), which prevented US tech from taking any significant foothold and left the market available for local competition.

> enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed

Can you tell me which business can't work in the EU? Selling software is legal. Operating a SaaS is legal. Hell, even industrial-scale spyware is legal, as long as you become big quickly enough so that enforcing the GDPR against you becomes counterproductive. The only thing I see that can't be done is industrial-scale corporation-on-consumer fraud, but I don't think we're losing much because of that.