In general I don't disagree with your point. People can go to far on China in how powerful they are. But I think you are going to far in the other direction.

You have a lot of confidence in the US to implement smart long term thinking industrial policy. Despite the US having shown to be very bad at that for a long time.

For a country that can seem to figure out how to build a single high speed train line or figure out that having a subway makes a lot of sense.

While the other country builds high speed train lines all over the place and has many cities building more subways then all of the US combined.

We can look at EVs as well. China dominates the supply chain and production.

Yes the US

> If you can explain how the long term economics of China will survive crushing authoritarianism, isolationism, and a sharp demographic decline, I'm all ears.

Authoritarianism increases and decreases over time. China has been well functioning for a while now. Claiming that Authoritarianism is gone ruin everything they do is questionable at best. Our actual insight into China government internals isn't mostly guesswork. Specially as there is lots of evidence that US democracy isn't actually producing fantastic long term thinking.

China isn't actually isolated right now. And they wont be unless they make pretty fundamental mistakes.

The West in totality is also suffering demographic decline. Specially Japan.

Its kind of Ironic that the fear of 'overpopulation' pushed by idiot leftists intellectuals in the West was the greatest strategic weapon ever invented against China.

> They didn't establish themselves as a benevolent world power and construct their own political sphere.

They are increasing their influence in lots of places. And lots of other places are willing to go with the flow. One can imagine a future where Russia, Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan and many South East Asian countries become influenced by China over time. The same goes for Africa.

And places like UAE/Saudi and co aren't actually US allies in any meaningful way and would happily turn to China if they thought it gave them an advantage.

China doesn't need to lead them as the US leads NATO, but if they are all opposed to the 'Western Order' its gone be tough.

> They do not have resource independence.

But they do actually have control over lots of resources and refinement currently that would be incredibly hard for the West to be without. It would take very long for the West to produce sufficient amounts of these things. So I think in practice a divided market would be catastrophic for both sides.

Practically speaking the West does not have resource independence. And even best case, it would take decades to have it.

If China really wanted they could mass produce nuclear reactors and produce carbon fuel as needed. Its only a matter of investment. They have the Uranium/Thorium to do it. And if you do it at scale its not that expensive. If China were actually preparing for a serious war they would do this.

This leads me to think that China and the US will continue to rattle their chains at each other for decades to come with neither actually doing anything to throw over the apple cart.