Thread by @wmhuo168

America destroyed its own talent pool while China built the world’s smartest engineers. This thread exposes the quiet collapse no one wants to admit.

the74million.org/article/the-fu…

The final insult isn’t China’s tech edge. It’s the talent genocide we inflicted on ourselves.

We hollowed out the very system that was supposed to produce our scientists, engineers, and inventors. (1/9)

China’s multisynapse optical AI wasn’t born from venture capital or Ivy League hype. It came from real engineers trained by a state that still believes in education. (2/9)

We stopped teaching our kids how the world works. No real math. No real science. Just rote rules, test prep, and distraction. We told generations to follow feelings, not understand forces. (3/9)

PISA rankings don’t lie. We’re 30th. China is 1st. Our high schools are diploma mills. Their high schools are launchpads for national tech strategy. (4/9)

Half of our STEM PhDs are foreign-born. Most are Chinese. They prop up our labs, build our chips, write our code. Then they watch Wall Street offshore everything they create. (5/9)

This isn’t a brain drain. It’s a brain swap. We send MBAs to Shenzhen. They send photonics PhDs to Stanford. Who wins? (6/9)

While we gamify apps and subsidize Netflix, China funds national key labs and aligns talent with industrial policy. We gave up on planning. They doubled down. (7/9)

You can’t out-innovate a country that educates its children and treats scientists like patriots. We treat them like expendable labor. (8/9)

This isn’t about fear. It’s about facts. We dismantled our talent engine. China upgraded theirs. The result is optical AI, quantum supremacy, and 5G dominance. This is just the opening act. (9/9)