Did the West control the world and could it do anything to stop China? It's something organic that can't really be controlled once the technologies are there for a global technology (edit: I mean a global economy), I think.
Chinese strategy was/is to become the worlds factory. China successfully manipulated the west's biggest weakness. It created a situation where every individual is incentivized to do the wrong thing (set up factories in china) and the only solution is collective action via regulation. Through it's success, it has cemented itself as a single point of failure in the worlds supply chain. China now has a knob to turn up the pain on anyone who defies it or attempts to hold it accountable.
A government has an obligation to protect national security. Letting another country be a single point of failure in your supply chain is a major failure of national security and ability to self determine. The government failed to regulate IP transfers and failed to restrict businesses from behavior that, while individually harmless, is collectively harmful.
The US governments failure to regulate very much ceded power directly to China.
Add to that the unequal trade agreements of china practicing protectionism while America does not and the result is a stunning American foreign policy failure.
The prevailing idea was that the west thought an economically successful china would liberalize, and therefore this ceding of power was ok and a net benefit. I think the violation of Hong Kong and Xi's wolf warrior diplomacy has been the turning point where the west now understands that China is an ideological enemy with a zero sum ideology.
If the technology was the only thing that mattered you would expect India to be on par with the PRC in terms of GDP and growth.
We invested specifically and heavily into the PRC, and there’s a case to be made that that was a mistake as long as the CCP was the exclusive dominant political party within the PRC because right now, it’s still that. Not that a democratic China is necessarily a friendly China, but it’s at least one we wouldn’t have to trade against our liberal values to trade with.
