I would not trust her main point "China is far beyond copying the West." for 3 reasons:<p>1.Everything on China is in the end Central planned, an article that criticize anything about the Govertment-country and you are out of business, so when writing people auto censor itself in the bad things, over extend in the good things.<p>Of course Chinese Internet services are better than those from the US in China. Most of them work at Kbits/second if they work at all.<p>2.The person that writes this is in a privilege position, e.g when I was living and working on China I lived much better there that in Europe, so of course she believes everything is fantastic.<p>3.She is Chinese national. Just watch CCTV for five minutes on a song festival and you will start hearing songs about how great the Chines army is. In China you are surrounded by this stuff all day. Like advertisements most people believe they are not affected by it, but it is pervasive and it does affect you after a long exposure.<p>I consider Chinese central planned system poisonous for innovation, specially: "Chinese companies are fierce and grow out of alkaline land".<p>What the last statement means is that Chinese companies have absolutely no ethics, and in the end everything is about knowing-buying the people in power because those people will remove your taxes or give you the permit or credit or anything you need(and you need anything they want you to need or else...).<p>In China you have to share your innovations with other companies, this makes your bargaining power near zero while the company with more direct line with power gets the profit.
>>> ... I first attempted to stay in contact with US friends via Facebook Twitter, Instagram, via VPN of course. But every US service was slow — gmail, google cal were barely working. So half way through, I decided to fully embrace what China has to offer and disappeared from US Social networking sites.<p>A choice? I think not. Soft censorship. The degrading of one communication pathway to shift the target onto another is espionage 101 stuff.
<i>China is far beyond copying the West. Great innovation is happening everywhere in China.</i><p>China's principal reputation for copying is in manufacturing and industry; it seems that the author's experience is in what I might call "small apps" [1], but the more interesting copying has been at the heavy industry end of the scale; for example, copying the German Transrapid train design (or a Siemens power plant!). Does anyone know to what degree China is still in the copying phase of this kind of heavy industry, and how widespread it is? I do know companies that operate on the assumption that anything they build in China is unprotected and anything they sell to China is a technology transfer.<p>[1] Compared to, for example, massive desktop applications or operating systems or specialised contracted commercial software that will run for over a decade from initial tender to release.