I thought you use the competivetiveness of the Chinese animation industry to explain why the old local style was lost, since it is a country's animation industry as a whole, I thought you were implying international competition, and it didn't sound adequate to me, as a badly made knockoff of foreign animations would still fare badly competing against the originals.

The knowledge of the old Chinese animation style is unlikely to have lost, many of the old animators are still alive, and the records of the working processes are not burned or shredded, it's just it's not very viable in the current environment so there isn't much demand for learning it.