>western companies fleeing

Western FDI constituted negligible part of PRC domestic investment as % of GDP for years. Like low single digit percentage of total investment. It largely doesn't matter. Of course western companies they're not excited after US made it geopolitically difficult to invest in PRC, because without literally making it legally difficult to do business in PRC, companies wouldn't have China+1ed/fled. That's not PRC not being attractive, that's US forcing their companies to take the L for geopolitics, which is fair. But questionable if it hurts PRC more or US.

>SEMI supply chain

They're chaining together entirely indigenous semi industry. 12/24nm under validation from SMEE. Every component has domestic ventures to replicate. A few years out, expensive/wasteful, might run late, but will eventually get there as with all PRC industiral policy that gets the manhattan project fast track. Pretty much the only country with entire semi supply chain development on horizon and talent base to man it. Huawei increased orders for 7nm phones, eating away at Apple shares. Opposite of fizzle.

>skilled labor/youth unemployment

PRC hard tech sectors have exploded in employment and compensation. Broad unemployhment 5% which means new graduates get jobs eventually. There's new youth unemployment stats to discount students in tertiary like west, it's fine at ~20%. Even at 50% that includes youth in fulltime school, that's multiple times new talent than US. Meanwhile you have sea turtles / skilled talent from abroad going back to PRC and they're retaining more high end talent than ever due to domestic opportunities. Youth unemployment breakdown also biased towards low skilled. High skill are generally fine.

>operationalize it.

PRC's has operationalized domestic MIC for 10+ years now. This is old boring news talked endlessly by US thinktanks for years. You're imagining they're learning to crawl when they're near sprint. That's why they're recognized as the pacing peer threat. No one credible thinks PRC isn't operationalizing modern capabilities at scale.

> Spotted by a drone

This this was reference to attack last year that damaged active patriot batteries. RU haven't used them more because they don't have good ISR/fast kill chains for how mobile patriots are, can't build high end missiles fast enough unlike west/PRC. So not worth commitiment. They have hardware, but limited, theres like 100 Kinzhals total and they used 20?. TLDR is they lack capability to coordinate strikes. PRC tests more high end missiles a year than RU can produce. This looks extra bad for patriots because even RU, as incompetent as they are at ISR still managed to penetrate patriot when they dedicated some highend (really medium end) hardware to the task.

> Live tests

USS Mason shot down shit tier Yemen cruise missiles (like old PRC 80s tech) in 2016, shooting down similar missiles and drones doesn't bring new learning except from PLA sigint in region gathering data on US weapon systems since they weren't in Djibouti at the time. Really shotting down primitive single digit clusters of cruise missiles is not even a useful live stress test.

>NASA_X-43

Many reports on PLA rocketforce expansion, they're making them at scale, hitting moving targets at sea. Leaks verify speed/performance. Putting up 100s of ISR for kill chain. What hasn't been verfied is US building capabilites to defend mach 5+ threats, especially at scale.

>US target in response to a blocked ends in a nuclear exchange

At the point US tries to blockade PRC ends in a nuclear exchange. See how that works. Point is PRC already deters US from even attempting blockade by making CONUS as vunerable as PRC is to SLOC blockades. SLOC blockade math works on rationale that US can enforce unilateral/existential damage to PRC without damage to herself. Now US can't without basically being in same energy deprived state as PRC. Hence US likely won't. Only real deterrence catchup is nuclear parity.

>Quick head

Quick headcount, PRC has magnitude more missile inventory and missile defense relative to RU:UKR, focused on island 16x smaller with even less perimeter to preposition defenses. The geography and math here isn't difficult, PRC can trivially overwhelm launchers TW has, assuming they even work when sensors are gone in first strike - PRC can hit anywhere in TW in 7 minutes.

> like everything else does

I mean they can land on mars first go, so I think it'll land on a carrier fine.

>windfall

PRC doesn't export high end, and RU not in position to export in middle of war with their limited industrial base.

TLDR patriots and SM2 working as intended, with expected limitations. Which is to say overwhelmable by power that can coordinate more than a handful of high performance missiles at a time. Which is actually pretty high ask but certainly includes PRC. PRC semi doing fine, catching up faster than anticipated, remember how they were suppose to be capped at 28nm. Meanwhile, they're still climbing up on the supply chain ladder, displacing more and more high tech from west, growing in S&T/innovation indexes. They crippled their R/E with 3RL and soft tech on purpose and still chugging along. Eitherway this is departing from the Original topic, so I'm going to hang hat here.