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.