Maybe you haven’t recently visited the city of Shenzhen, a former fishing village, across the border from Hong Kong. There seem to be more actions, more vitality, and more startups there than in the Valley these days. China has raised more VC funding than the US last year, and there’re also more Chinese unicorns than in the US.
US is clearly still in the lead on higher education, but the trend is worrisome. We produce abundance of business, law, political science students, etc., but not enough high quality STEM students. The situation with graduate schools is even more dire.