No, innovation today needs money & experience/track record just as much as anything else. Take Intel, AMD, IBM for instance. There is no other uarch or processor comparable to their most powerful chips, no amount of education will get you past that. Now even if you come up with such a hypothetical design will it still beat Intel @5nm when that other chip is being built on 14nm? Same goes for QC & their wireless solutions. At this point China's best bet is ARM & Huawei is betting big on that. This is also why mega corporations are virtual monopolies & indeed a bad thing, tangentially speaking.
What you're describing is the effect of having a large library of tech patents, not experience or a track record of innovation. Patents can be bought - as most patents held by current large tech corporations are (through mergers and acquisitions). There is no other microarchitecture that can compete with X86 because developing a microarchitecture is very complex, yes, but also because the technology is extremely well guarded and licences are only awarded to a handful of actors (who then lock themselves into keeping them by innovating on top of the licence and licencing their innovations back). The thing is, turnover within these companies is enormous, and the engineers and other people involved are replaceable to a large degree. Of course there's the difficulty of finding equally qualified replacements (an issue with any highly specialized field), but given access to information and education, it's possible - just a bit slow. Availability of knowledge is the deciding factor, then comes money (which there certainly isn't a lack of in China), then comes specific people.
This is one of those events that remind us (and should remind you all) that we're living in a world of conflicting interests. Is this (also) about being on top of the food chain? Of course. The question you need to be asking yourself, is do you want to eat or be eaten. And entirely unrelated to your personal opinion, by living in a Western country, you're part of it and yes you will be on 'a side' of these conflicts.
Huawei was becoming far too influential for our own good and the 5G rollout was going to be a major vehicle for China to deploy mass surveillance outside of its own borders. Even the slightest chance of that happening should be a massive warning sign, and I'm glad to see it was, already over six years ago.
We can start worrying about our economy and innovation leadership and diplomacy after that. Make no mistake: China plays the game just like this and now experiences a major setback in their power creep.
Just a side note; this might even be bigger than just China. This might even be mostly about the US and geopolitical influence as a whole. The recent fleet movements towards Iran, the timing of these things is never coincidental, and already you can see this is a timing strategy that maximizes the impact and psychological effect. For Huawei, not only were they about to make the biggest deal in history, they were also the top smartphone company. If they'd been shot down three years earlier, the damage would've been minimal. But, we waited patiently for the opponent to yell 'All in!' to slam the door in its face.
Another important side note: Trump's term is coming to an end soon, and what better way than conflict to reinforce faith in your current POTUS.
Add all of those aspects up and you can see why the timing of this is so, so convenient.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your analysis, the main issue is that the foundations of this thinking is
wrong (or, arguably, just really !#@%! dumb) even if world leaders tend to believe it. Fundamentally conflicting interests only exist if you believe nations are somehow able to exist entirely separately, which has never been true, and certainly isn't in our day. Countries are
intertependent. Period. Sure, there are still some more powerful than others, and there is a serious lack of democratic agency in global politics (read: it's entirely nonexistent), but the ideological basis of viewing global politics as
competition rather than
cooperation is what causes garbage like this to happen. This is of course neither the US's nor China's fault alone, but rather a remnant of centuries-old nationalist thinking. Europe post-WWII is an excellent example of how changing this presumption can radically alter relations between countries with vastly different levels of influence, as the focus on interdependent trade relations and peaceful cooperation transformed the continent with the most frequent and large-scale wars over the past few centuries into the most peaceful continent. Ever. In the history of mankind. That's a
staggering achievement, and current right-wing politicians attempting to undermine this because a few dubious actors are challenging the system is ... idiotic. Competition (in general, but especially as reflected in current global capitalism) inherently has more losers than winners. The issue is that the world doesn't work that way - if other people lose, the winners inevitably lose as well. Maybe not initially, and maybe subtly, but cooperation gains everyone, not just a few. And sure, this will mean that the most powerful, who would likely have "won", can see themselves as "losing" because they're not running away with more than everyone else. But that's a dangerous, damaging, detrimental and delusional idea in a globally interdependent world. And we can't stop living in one just because we don't like it - at least not without also abandoning the products of this world, such as global industry. I seriously doubt the average Trump voter would support him if they were shown that a necessary consequence of following his ideology to its end is regression in pretty much all metrics, from wealth to food availability to technology to everything else we have and use in our lives.
Tl;dr: isolationism as a response to growing powers challenging the established world order is about as logical as cutting off your leg to stop a broken toe from hurting.
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