> They have all the talent because China is poor, still.
That’s why China has (somewhat) inexpensive labor. It does not explain why China has far more plastic engineering talent, electrical engineering talent, etc than the US.
They have more talent because that's where talent is needed. You don't staff factories with "talent", you staff them with labor. Then you need "talent" to design the process. It all feeds back. We used to have injection molding plastic experts in the US in the 70's! The technology was invented here. But they all retired and no one stepped in to replace them because those factories all closed down. Chinese kids picked up the slack.
The US wasn't sleeping though. We trained a generation of software engineering talent that remains the envy of the world. There are whole web sites devoted to this "Hacker" subculture, even. Maybe we can find one.
Seriously: there's no problem here. This is the way economies work.
That’s why China has (somewhat) inexpensive labor. It does not explain why China has far more plastic engineering talent, electrical engineering talent, etc than the US.