These terms, the Western companies agreed to to gain a piece of the juicy Chinese market. And the Chinese did it because they had the rare power to stop Western companies from just coming and draining resources, in the colonial manner the West usually operates.

Building on this, China has now surpassed the West on much development. Electric cars, solar technology, cell phone towers are now much more advanced in China.

The West started shifting production to China for immense cost savings, over 40 years ago. At the time, China had almost NO market, and no (what the West called, at the time) "middle class". China was mostly agrarian, and had very little manufacturing base.

There was nothing "juicy" for the West, market wise. At all.

Over the last 40 years, China's economy has prospered, grown, again mostly due to the West's user of Chinese labour. Virtually the entire manufacturing base that China has right now, exists because Western expertise, skill, and capabilities helped Chinese factories, and workers, come online and train in Western production methods.

Prior to 40 years ago, everyone except the British couldn't have cared less for China, and the British indeed had Hong Kong.. something pre-existent from THEIR colonial days. The British could have retained Hong Kong, but as agreed did turn it over to China at the turn of the century. No, China had no capability to enforce that, not back around the year 2000.

Note that the colonial days of "the West" makes little sense. Many Western nations were not colonialists, and the US is actually a breakaway colony, and has worked to curtail colonialism! To lump "the West" together, would be like thinking Japan and China are the same, because they are all "Oriental".

Back to China, very little China does "surpasses the West". In fact, so little capability does China have, that when the US kicked an embargo for advanced silicon against China, it lost is capability for several years, to domestically manufacture cell phones.

Look, I get the feeling you're pro-China. And perhaps, you grew up in China.

First, there are three things. The Chinese government. Chinese culture. Chinese people.

The last? We can stop discussing that now, because unless you are racist, there is no such thing as "Chinese people act a certain way, because they are Chinese".

However, there is such a thing as "Chinese culture", derived mostly from China, although of course there are endless factions and cultures in China, languages, no China isn't Han alone!!

But for simplicity, we'll assume Han culture == Chinese culture, and move on from there.

One of the largest coups that I feel the current dictatorship in China has accomplished, and dictatorship it is, when you don't step down and decide to serve a third term, is to convince Chinese people that "Chinese government = Chinese people". That's no so.

The Chinese government has many negative qualities. One of those qualities is a suppression of free will, excessive monitoring of its citizens, such as the social credit system, and this does indeed result in a lack of creativity. It also results in a lack of drive, of desire for people to excel, for when people like Jack Ma simply go missing, because they excel, because they do well, because they choose to take part in directing Chinese society, you end up with an innate desire to not show your true capability.

For if you do? The government will appear, take control of your works, your creation, and you'll be left out in the cold. In fact, you'll probably be killed.

These two things, fear of stepping out of bounds, and fear of excelling, do indeed create issues. This is why totalitarian governments have always fallen behind more open systems, for centrist driven societies always do. Politicians are absolutely not equipped to "see the future", to understand what inventions can be useful or not, and in fact most researchers cannot either! Research must be free, unfettered, not organized, and the output of research must be judged, not the input. Put another way, the usefulness of a research path is not readily apparent until that research path is taken.

Yet centrist control attempts to direct the path of research, where as non-centrist control has endless paths of research sprouting, growing, dying, organically allowing society itself to judge the value of such things.

This is what I mean by the fact that Chinese culture, does not allow for open development, and it is true. It is not a "Chinese" thing, but a "totalitarian thing", and has been seen over, and over, and over again, regardless of the genetic history of the peoples involved. It's a cultural thing.

Back to the coup I referred to prior. By indelibly linking two ideas, the Chinese Government and The Chinese People as one in the minds of most Chinese citizens, you foster a culture as we see here. That directed attacks against the Chinese dictatorship, the CCP, and Xi, are somehow an attack against the common person in China.

Not so.

Even if you do believe in a different governmental system, (which you'd be wrong, but such belief is OK to do in the West!), one of China's failures, both as a people, and a government, is a complete lack of understanding of the West. An inability to understand that we generally, actually believe what we stand for. That it's not all for show.

An example. I dislike portions of my current government. Some choices made. The current leader of my Westminster governmental system. I can think that he should be replaced, that he is currently a liability, whist at the same time recognize that some things he has done are OK. And I can shout "replace that man!" at the top of my lungs, without impinging upon the Canadian people, or its culture!.

Most people who grew up in China (not Hong Kong!), have a difficult time with this. This concept is hard to accept. I get that, but at the same time, it is core. Key. Vital to comprehend.

No matter how much people in the West rail again a current leader, THEY ARE STILL LOYAL TO THEIR COUNTRY. And no matter how much people in the West complain about Xi, and the current CCP, THEY ARE NOT IMPINGING UPON THE CHINESE PEOPLE.

This is often lost on anyone immersed in Chinese culture.

Anyhow. I don't have time to engage more at this moment. I will check back to see if you reply, but if you do, please engage inline with my comments. Or at least understanding the actual history of West/Chinese interaction.

Mass marketing things isn't innovation. It's copying. DJI seems like more copying. "Innovation" isn't marketing. It's raw research and development, along market paths which are useful. This requires a desire for change, a desire to not conform first, but capitalism first, and this is what China's culture does not have.

They inherit from confucianism, and a more collectivist mindset that is prevalent in this area of the planet, but I don't think it should be conflated with the way the economy is organised.

The Japanese on the other hand are overall conformist and conservative.

With just these counter examples, it doesn't feel like you're looking at the right variables to judge whether innovation is embedded in the culture or not.

So are all “communist” countries. Communism (either Marxist or more generally) as a whole isn’t authoritarian, but all “communist” countries are products of Leninism or its derivatives, which definitely are, fundamentally, authoritarian.

There is a few essential properties of a "communist" system that modern China doesn't have. Most of the capital is privately owned, the social safety net is very poor, etc.

If you can look at a DJI drone and maintain this opinion...

It’s also a mistake to underestimate the market value of copies and clones. In many cases a cloned version of a product is better than the original. E.g., clones that remove over-engineering of the original and simplify the product down to its basic idea and offer it at a lower price.

It’s also a mistake to confuse manufacturing prowess for the ability to make “copies.” It’s not China’s fault that its competitors quite literally won’t bother producing in their own country.

It’s also a mistake to confuse a gain of experience for stealing intellectual property. A good deal of innovation in Silicon Valley comes from the fact that developers can move to new companies without non-compete clauses and take what they learned from their last job to build new, sophisticated software.

The fact that a bunch of Western companies set up factories in China and simultaneously expect Chinese employees and managers to gain zero experience and skill in that industry is incredibly contradictory. If we build a satellite office for Google and Apple in Austin, Texas then we shouldn’t be surprised that Austin, Texas becomes a hub for software startups, some of which compete with the companies that chose Austin in the first place.

And that’s probably the only reason. If push comes to shove, they can probably innovate if given proper incentives.

I heard the tale about the Japanese lens industry. For the longest time they made crap lens that were just clones of foreign designs until the Japanese government banned licensing of foreign lens designs forcing their people to design their own lens. Now they are doing pretty well in that industry if I’m right.

You also have to be making something that isn’t of critical strategic importance.

Example: glue https://www.npr.org/transcripts/702642262

The amount of outright theft of entire IP from US, Canadian, and European countries by China is well known. There is no confusion here, in more recent times people have been arrested and charged for it, and it's how China is able to compete.

FWIW There was a time when that was was the received wisdom about the USA, from the point of view of European powers. It was shortsighted, and not particularly accurate then either.

Japan’s democracy seems to be a hold-over from its imperialist ambitions from the Meiji restoration, when the emperor took power back from the shogunate and “westernized” to fast-track.

Meaning, the Japanese took all of the trappings of western civilization but under the veneer it’s still distinctly Japanese.

Agile civil development.

All the people I know who worked with and for Korean and Japanese entities have countless examples to show how alien the corporate culture is for westerners.

South Korea in particular doesn't seem exactly like a heaven for personal growth and experimentation.

Not to dunk on China particularly here, I do/did enjoy a lot of hq chinese products.

I once spoke to a Chinese person who speculated: "I wish that the Chinese were as conformant and uniform as the Americans - China is too diverse and unruly!"

I think that it's a common human habit to upsell one's own diversity and downplay that of others.

Explain DJI and Douyin/TikTok.

I mean, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are trying to hook you up on a dopamine drip so they can force-feed you some ads. TikTok is just pure crack that caught the world by surprise - and it's not even pushing you ads! Honestly, to this day I'm not sure what their business model is.