[yusuke10]

It's funny, if an author with a book to peddle repeats the mantra enough times..."China is innovative", it might become true.

And yet, what evidence does she raise?

"the electronics were assembled in China; almost never were they invented in China"

"paying with your smartphone has become the norm"

"bikeshare firms"

"China has the largest number of unicorns outside the US"

Nothing that would define as innovations. Let's ask ourselves. What consumer innovations has China come up with in the last 40 years that is known worldwide. Think hard. Maybe none? one? Now compare that against Japan in its 40 years rise.

[ghostcluster]

Best example I can think of is DJI. Best in class consumer electronics drone manufacturer and a worldwide brand with high cache.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI_(company)

Founded by a Chinese engineering student with a personal aeronautics hobby, based in Shenzhen — he's now a billionaire.

[vadimberman]

Actually, yes. DJI and Yi-Hang. These ones are truly impressive.

But apart from this, KPIs aside, the Chinese landscape is amazingly scarce innovation-wise. If one has to tout bikesharing as innovation, it sounds like there's not much to brag about. I am puzzled at Kai-Fu Lee's claims, he's not just another VC.

[seanmcdirmid]

I’ve heard from someone who actually met with him at Innovation Works that Kai Fu actually encourages the startups he funds to be derivative. It is much less risky that way, and VCs in china don’t like much risk, Preferring to transplant proven businesses from elsewhere.

[TTPrograms]

I would argue drones are mostly commodities at this point.

[nl]

DJI, WeChat, Quantum comms satellite, the Xiaomi production model, overnight train station building etc etc.

I dunno - I can think of lots of criticisms of China but this isn't one.

[petra]

Maybe China is innovative, but regarding Xiaomi, i'm not so sure they have a unique production model, or rather they are willing to sustain low profits, or are even be subsidized by China - because controlling people's phones is a really valuable thing.

[nl]

Or maybe everyone just loves their products, because of their closely linked sales and manufacture process? And their careful use of flash sales and then incremental releases of the same product lets them profit from dropping bill-of-material prices over time so their overall margin is the same as the industry average, even though they sell high-end phones at close to zero margin.

Xiaomi believes that in markets where consumer preferences are hard to predict and change rapidly, “flash sales” can help determine which products are likely to be big hits, driving future production.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bigbangdisruption/2014/04/03/bi...

A big contributor to its profitability is its introduction of new products through online pre-order “flash” sales, which is usually a highly anticipated event in the community. At the phone’s introduction, Xiaomi sets a limit to the number of pre-orders possible, which will often sell out in the first hour or even within minutes. After it has taken its initial set of orders, Xiaomi will then work with Foxconn, its ODM, to build phones. This allows the company to receive advance payment from customers while incurring extremely low inventory costs because products are shipped from Foxconn directly to customers. Xiaomi also has very minimal sales and marketing costs because most advertising is done through its social networks.

and

Xiaomi, on the other hand, at launch, sets the consumer price close to the BOM cost, which ensures price competitiveness. At point 2, BOM cost has already declined, Xiaomi limits the availability of devices, and selected device batches are manufactured at the lower BOM cost. At point 3, mass deliveries start when gross margin is high enough, and volume accelerates as BOM cost decreases. At point 4, when consumer price becomes less competitive, they launch an “S” version of the product by upgrading selected components (e.g. engine) and launch at an even lower price. However, at this point, the BOM price has decreased. Overall, the longer product life gives a better lifetime margin.’

https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/xiaomi-mobile-disruptor-fro...

[yorwba]

I agree that those are not examples of original ideas. But being the first to have an idea isn't actually that important. James Watt is famous for the steam engine, although he "only" improved the existing design.

Similarly, the innovation in many of the domains where China is "ahead" of the rest of the world is not in the original idea, but in actually making it work so that it took off. And that doesn't necessarily mean that those Chinese companies were somehow more innovative than companies that tried the same ideas elsewhere, but that the Chinese market valued those ideas more.

I'm actually not sure how many Japanese innovations weren't "just" incremental improvements of some existing idea that were tried in multiple countries but took off the fastest in Japan.

[Arn_Thor]

You're ignoring the fact that China's rise is really in its 17th year, if we count from it joining the WTO (which is arguably too early). At that point if I recall my cultural history correctly Japanese copy products were just about managing quality parity with US and European products. Give it time