Comment by jfengel

I think you'd be surprised by how much hustle culture China has. The notion of them being simply copyists is outdated. It's the same mistake that the US made with Japan in the 1970s.

The Chinese one-party system is a lot more authoritarian than the West's, but it doesn't micromanage everything the way people imagine it does. People at the bottom are entirely capable of innovating. It's true that for a long time they just innovated new, cheaper, better ways to copy, but that was a matter of economic position, not political organization.

They've been improving that for decades. And while there's still a lot of very dull people produced in Chinese universities, there are a lot of people there overall, and the top 0.01% is a huge number.

I don't know if this is a good or bad thing for the world. I've always felt weird that the US should have such a corner on the market for novel design. Despite our back-patting we're not better than everybody else.