It has been 4 years since Covid-19.
From q2 2020 to q1 2022, China attracted export orders as many parts of the world was shut down. US lowered the interested rate and asset prices surged.
Then a few things happened: the war in Ukraine, the interest rate hikes, and the Shanghai lockdown among rolling lockdown in different parts of China.
From q2 2022 to q1 2024, US has attracted capital with high rates and developments in AI. US started to introduce more targeted policies in maintaining tech leadership (namely AI), from foundry subsidiaries and chip restrictions. China would get rid of lockdowns but started an even more difficult fight with property sector problems.
As of now, after the eventful four years, many things have rebalanced to a point that I think many have achieved their agenda.
US regained global leadership, via global defense partnerships in Ukraine and middle-east, and via LLMs, monopoly in the most advanced chips, and computing power. US has diversified supply chains and TSMC has plans to build 3nm or below to the US.
China recalibrated its growth model and has de-risked this property bubble. China has built out its own chip capabilities although very limited and maybe only up to 7nm (Huawei restarted smartphone business again in China). China now views itself with fewer chock points than before.
Policymakers should be happy? They seem to have gained tremendous power. In first 2 years, they seem to be reacting / pushed to do things, while in the second 2 years, they were definitely more active in setting the tone.
Regular people lost some confidence/freedom in the last two years, after the first two years of gaining lots of bargain power