[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.