It was going to be, but the CCP seems determined to deprive their innovative companies of oxygen and happy to make state controlled companies the favorites.
SV started off doing work for the military. Manhattan Project was an "state enterprise", so was sending people to the moon. If a state owned sector is deemed strategic, and we can sleep soundly knowing that China definitely considers information technologies (h/w, infra, s/w, ai) as strategic, it generally does well in competent nations.
The fact of stagnating sectors in planned and/or centralized economies always seems to boil down to self-defeating incentives, possibly merely as one symptom of general bureaucratic malaise. To wit, no one had to dangle the incentive of wealth in front of the exceptionally capable men and women who were active in research and development in US in the heydays of the cold war. The nongeek (mostly military) people who shepherded cagey super smart people like Feynman apparently went through a trial and error phase before they figured out how to manage them. And lucky for the creative types, the bureaucracy involved was very much aligned with them in finding super cool new things. That's why we have DARPA. If China has its own version of DARPA, they clearly have the brains, and Chinese are if nothing else exceptionally creative people, with a proven historic track record of hacking. What ailed them historically was a bureaucracy that failed to see in, or obtain strategic benefit from, the inventions.
-Bureaucracies have been a problem to date- for humanity. (Even clerics can be conceptually viewed as 'ministry of god' bureaucrats, which is precisely what most of them are.) We haven't cracked this nut yet and imho it is an important one that is impeding human progress: we need them to get things done at large scale and in continuity, but they inevitably end up being the tail that wags the dog of society and state. The problem is of course the human in the equation (knowledge base, specialized language, meta-interactions) makes them impervious to correctives and purges. Possibly AI will finally help us get over this structural hump.
