At PRC scale, Quantity begets quality. Massive population = spamming and refining becomes viable policy. China is graduating absurd number of STEM graduates that they can spam papers and if 1% is great, they become globally competitive, refine to 2% or 3% great after a few years and they start leading fields. Producing a lot of shit papers and filtering out / holding onto those who distinguish themselves to improve next gen of talent is part of the process. Even if side effect is hilarious levels of academic fraud, which TBH is problem in west as well.<p>Also note serious PRC efforts at improving higher education (project 211) started in the mid 90s, and long term plan is to make top 5% of universities world leading by 2050, about ~140/3000 and growing institutions, by 2050s (project double first class). Wheat:chaff ratio is expected to improve steadily over time. Or take a look at how many masters/phd foreign students in western universities/labs are from PRC. Now more and more selection bias and geopolitics is retaining top talent within PRC despite decades of massive brain drain. Or the high youth unemployment among educated class, which is strictly not a good thing but also illustrates the stupid level of over production of talent behind these numbers.<p>Excess talent that PLA wants to recruit for modernized military. That's why I don't think demographic bomb has much impact on PRC's economic/military long term potential. Frankly PRC with bottom tier TFR is still going to generate more talent than PRC needs.