Yeah Chinese cars are absolute lemons, you make a good point. However, I think because it is a communist party and inefficient in its allocation of resources, they overflow certain amounts of money into sectors like Microcontrollers and Machine Learning to focus on. While they are inefficient with their money, I imagine enough money will provide innovation and market control in the select sectors they choose. Chinese students have been increasingly studying electronics for decades while the US I'd say has been declining overall in hardware expertise. Granted the Chinese engineers are probably lower quality, consisting of an ego contest. Their culture doesn't encourage individual/independent which is what is necessary to achieve breakthroughs and innovations. Their public primary schooling is definitely ahead of the US all the way up to High School but they are just regurgitating what is already known.

I would not be so worried if our government and financial sector were not so blatantly influenced and controlled by the CCP. This is a huge problem on our end I don't see being solved anytime soon. We're too soft as a nation, we need to harden for this.