I think China gets a lot of credit for being a "manufacturing superpower" but that kind of oversells what it is.
Look especially at dollar value of exports: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264623/leading-export-co...
The fact that China has 3x the population of the US but only 1.5x the export dollar value of the US says quite a bit. Germany's exporting output is even more impressive considering their population of under 100 million.
NATFA's manufacturing export dollar value is almost equivalent to China.
Complex and heavy industry manufacturing is something where they are not caught up at all. E.g., lithography machines, commercial jet aircraft and engines.
The US/Canada/Mexico are no slouches when it comes to the automotive parts ecosystem. Germany exports more auto parts than China, and the US is barely below China in that regard. I would also point out that certain US/NAFTA and European automobile exports are still considered to be top quality over Chinese models. For example, China is not capable of producing a Ferrari or a vehicle with the complexity and quality of a Mercedes S-Class. That's not to discount the amazing strides that China has made in that area but it is to say that the West+Japan is no slouch in that area.
But to me this is all besides the point anyway. AI is so tied up in open source anyway, this idea that China will leapfrog in AI R&D is somewhat irrelevant in my mind. I don't think any one country will have better capabilities than anyone else. There is no moat.
And ultimately I still predict that Chinese AI will be mostly a domestic product because of heavy government involvement in private data centers and the great firewall.