China spent almost all of the last 30 years copying developed nations to try to catch up. They're still aggressively doing it across every field, from reverse engineering Russian jet engines, to stealing IP & copying US fighter jets, to using CRISPR knowledge & technology developed in the West to try to leap frog, to the Landwind clone of the Land Rover. Their phones remain copies of what Apple and Samsung are doing; nearly all of their domestic phones run versions of Android, because they can't build their own OS yet. Copying permeates their entire economy.
That isn't in fact a criticism or a negative. It makes sense for any poor or undeveloped nation - which China absolutely was until recently - to do that to attempt to rapidly improve.
No no, the kind of talking point that I was sarcastically referring to was one that kept surfacing in reaction to news suggesting that China might surpass the USA in technology. Back then the HN reaction was "China just copies therefore they can't innovate". It's no the "they copy" bit that I'm talking about, it's what implication was being drawn from there.
That "therefore" is a negative and in my opinion more than anything shows that American has been leading the world for so long that they can't even conceive that might not be the case at some point in the future. Even people in tech who should be paying attention dismiss it by saying "nah, they can't really innovate, they're just copying, and therefore will never surpass us".
China spent almost all of the last 30 years copying developed nations to try to catch up. They're still aggressively doing it across every field, from reverse engineering Russian jet engines, to stealing IP & copying US fighter jets, to using CRISPR knowledge & technology developed in the West to try to leap frog, to the Landwind clone of the Land Rover. Their phones remain copies of what Apple and Samsung are doing; nearly all of their domestic phones run versions of Android, because they can't build their own OS yet. Copying permeates their entire economy.
That isn't in fact a criticism or a negative. It makes sense for any poor or undeveloped nation - which China absolutely was until recently - to do that to attempt to rapidly improve.