[andrewmb]

Westerners seem to get majorly hung up on the "China copying" meme and miss the bigger picture--China is incredibly focused on technology and there are huge sums of money and a strong cultural impetus for home-grown innovation. As an analogy, China is at the stage where they have learned the major rules for a programming language, and are now copying and pasting advanced code from stackexchange or other places.

Let's not forget historical context either: Japan and S.Korea were once known as knockoff central, and now produce extremely advanced products in their own right.

[Volpe]

So are china:

BYD, Baidu, QQ, Weibo, PPS

Some of those products have no equivalent in the West, namely BYD and PPS.

Others are significantly different to our equivalents (Google/Baidu, BYD/Tesla(?), Weibo/(Twitter/Facebook))...

[gbog]

Douban, where I work, has no real equivalent outside of China, even if obviously everyone in China is looking closely at new things from the US.

[snowwrestler]

The copying phase is indeed common in nations that are developing their economies. The U.S. is just eager for China to get past it and start developing and protecting their own innovations. That will be better for everyone.

[general_failure]

> Westerners seem to get majorly hung up on the "China copying" meme

Huh? Nytimes seem to be hung up, yes. 'Westerners' seems to have slipped out.

[andrewmb]

I'm painting with a broad brush :). The extremely negative and short-sighted attitude about Chinese knockoffs is (in my experience) most prevalent in 'western' countries: USA, Canada, UK, Western Europe. I have less contact with Eastern Europe, South America or Africa so I can't comment on their reactions.

Attitudes toward copying are very cultural. In China, it stems from pragmatism and a greater focus on the ends rather than the means (winning trumps winning well) whereas in the US--and West--winning is important, but so is "playing fair".

[Volpe]

Just from reading the comments here you can get an idea it's more than the NY Times, the assumption of westerners is an assumption, but do you seriously think it's a bad one?