China isn’t simply a regime with a centrally planned technological machine.
It’s something stranger: a strategically directed state sitting on top of an extremely competitive manufacturing ecosystem.
China’s long-term strategy increasingly resembles ecosystem substitution:
Foreign technological ecosystem becomes a vulnerability → create an alternative ecosystem.
Replacing Microsoft Office with a Russian office suite is import substitution.
Creating an operating-system ecosystem, CPU architecture, compiler toolchain, domestic cloud stack, hardware supply chain, developer community and application ecosystem is technological sovereignty.
China is attempting the latter.