All this makes me think of how extremely valuable sophisticated high-end technology is and how important it is for some alternative to the Western bloc to have knowledge of these to be to able to leverage and disseminate.
I don’t keep up with scientific discoveries or anything like that so I don’t know what the next stage of technological advancement looks like. But if some non-Western country is able to attain whatever it is, especially in important areas like energy and computation, then it will significantly improve the chances of the biosphere not collapsing to the predation of big and mainly-Western corporations.
The litmus test for whether this is an existential threat to Western hegemony is gauging the response of the US state to percieved threats to the mere possibility of the contemporary boogeyman catching up in some sector of high end technology.
This is why I personally like China’s current plan of cultivating a stable environment for both transferring tech from the West and indigenously developing it.
We’re lucky China has captured a lot of the world’s manufacturing, because if they didn’t, the climate would truly be fucked. China’s emissions are scheduled to peak by 2025-30, and only go down from there.
Outside of that, the tech stuff is incredibly exciting, because of the silicon valley stranglehold on tech hardware and IP, especially processors / chips. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia have no rivals anywhere, but loongson, alibaba, and Huawei are all starting to develop home-grown chips. The expertise and tech transfer will continue.
I can already tell you the next stage of technological advancement in terms of climate will be carbon capture. Most if not all of the climate experts have gone on record saying this will be the technology that prevents the atmosphere from collapsing even if 2.0 degrees is passed, and because of the nature of the technology, fossil fuel pollution will be essentially cancelled out.
As for your Western hegemony bit, I’d say the Western hegemony has already disintegrated and the US is only giving off the illusion it hasn’t, they are paper tigers to borrow a Chinese analogy.
I disagree very much with the Western hegemony thing. Consider that most of Europe speaks English including solid chunks of places in Asia and Latin America. Not to mention neo-colonialism in places such as Africa and especially Latin America. It’s not over yet, but we will win, I’m sure.
