Comment by dirtyid

Basically. Spam educated STEM talent production to OECD combined, first gen makes shit (all the meme of bad PRC papers), but some wheat from chaff at that scale enables PRC to be 80% competitive, refine a bit by 2nd gen, now PRC reach peer competitiveness, refine a little more and we have PRC leading innovation index. Will take another gen or two to translate through industries (already happening in some sectors). TLDR is chabuduo at PRC scale works when right edge of bell curve is enough to compete with rest of world. Spamming innovation at scale works when it delivers enough gems. Chabuduo is not accident - it's strategy.