[codyb]

Correct me if I'm wrong, and not to downplay China's incredible advances in the last few decades or so but hasn't a lot of China's "tech advancement" been copying, sending their citizens abroad to learn and hoping they come back, and in many instances down right espionage?

To be fair, whenever I try to learn something new, I generally have to do a decent amount of "copying" in a sense to get started before I can improve and make my own contributions to whatever it is that I'm doing and learning so I suppose that's to be expected and is even a sensical approach at a societal level. Why invent a touch screen when several implementations exist? Reverse engineer or find research papers and build the same one. From there you can have the experience to tweak and make your own contributions to the touch screen world, etc, etc, etc ad nauseum until you're making contributions all over the place.