There are more Tsinghua / C9 calibre students who don't have the language proficiency or resources or adventurousness to go to MIT / abroad. Some may later chose to emigrate abroad, as they do now after making decent money, but my conversations with diaspora and their C9 kids is more and more are choosing to stay, simply because QoL and culture in PRC is at point where emigrating is harder decision unless you get high income jobs in select industries (like software engineering) vs 10/20 years ago. As for why not work in Seattle and live in a big house vs BJ shitbox? Hard to argue with that since IMO BJ kind of sucks, but there's plenty of much nicer modern cities in PRC to stick it out. Plenty of Chinese visit their friends in the west and don't care much for it, others really like having big houses and easy driving and slow living. But outside of a few tier1 western cities, wes feels more and more "backwater" vs PRC. Yes many still leave, net migration at 0.25/100k last few years vs 0.3/100k in 2010s, so ~350-400k, but what might have been double digit percentage of annual tertiary talent getting drained relative to talent production 10-20 years ago vs low single digit today. The quantity and quality of talent being retained is magnitude greater than before.

>thrive / illiberalism / big challenges

IMO above is why PRC is going to thrive because regardless of the domestic environment, the vast majority of talent simply can't leave - barring massive changes in western immigration schemes, particularly US, but that's unlikely to happen especially with respect to PRC nationals. But more broadly, on the topic of "culture", JP/SKR/TW had plenty of time to acclimate to the salaryman grind and QoL squeeze, their productivity is only going to stall and decline because they're already relatively developed and can't/won't be able replace talent at parity of loss. But their strategy worked fine for hard tech, meanwhile PRC 996 worked fine for soft tech, enough that it needed to be cracked down. Now consider PRC has 25% skilled workforce vs 60-80% of advanced economies, that's like another 2-4x Japan's worth of talent potential being spammed at 7-8M tertiary talent production per year that disproportionately bias STEM/techinical - simply far too many to be meaningfully brain drained.

And it's not like PRC or the west hasn't been going through their own host of social ills, but US S&T and innovation sectors were still growing during the GFC when the banks were foreclosing homes on the bottom quartiles. Meanwhile PRC climbed up the value chain and these S&T/innovation indexes amidst all the covid and real estate drama. That’s “thriving” in terms of building comprehensive power and it’s doing so under what folks deem terrible conditions, i.e. it’s the default momentum of upskilling millions of people per year and throwing them into the grind. Sure one can argue benchmarking against potential that's doing ok, but vs peers it's closer to thriving.

I think all the fixation on the “human condition” narrative is overstated, at the end of the day East Asian Tigers aren’t built on 40 hour work weeks. They’re built from hammering skilled human capital 200% harder than privileged west for 10% competitive advantage, and at PRC scale, that’s really enough for next several decades. Or more TLDR I think factors will enable to PRC as a country can thrive even if QoL does not.