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The amount of money that Chinese people send abroad to buy overpriced assets (housing in Vancouver, as an example) tells me that they don't trust their rule of law. I don't know if innovation can thrive in such an environment, but let us see. Maybe the rule of law is no better in other countries today.

>> To decisively refute your argument. The current leading company in Drones, is DJI The company was founded in 2006 by Frank Wang (Wāng Tāo, 汪滔). Who did not study Abroad.

If you can make that claim about a majority of such companies then you can say it decisively refutes the argument. You have given one example, which could either be a trend or an exception. But here is a question - how easy do you think it is to confirm if it is a trend or an exception? What does that say about the flow of information? If you were an entrepreneur trying to use this information to your advantage, how much confidence will you have in your assessment?

>> Before you call out Chinese government on Great Firewall, What about Patent Trolls?

Why can't both be wrong?

Also they brought the most populous country in the world from extreme poverty to a near superpower status

Doesn't that kind of prove his point? The worlds most populous country isn't even a super power. It under-performs.

BTW, a less hyperbolic rendition might be "china went from a low-income country to a middle income country", as that's all that happened. It was nothing particularly remarkable, the same thing happened in many Asian countries.

> Also they brought the most populous country in the world from extreme poverty to a near superpower status

Before that, they first had to bring the country into extreme poverty (see "The Great Leap Forward"). This is like boasting about stopping to beat your wife.

I'm not ashamed of calling out an embarrassing but true problem with China, nor have I said that the US is perfect; in fact overall I feel that the US is probably on a steady decline if things don't change but that's another subject that most people on HN are more familiar with, so I'm not as inclined to comment on that.

I am not saying world changing innovation is impossible in China. I am saying that it's much harder to achieve compared to other places given the current conditions. Given China's size and access to capital, if the bad conditions that I describe were to improve there would be a 1000 more DJI level companies.

> If the only innovation is some stupid IOT microwave made (with heart emoji) in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley has long existed before the 90's. Its tech culture is almost as old as the PRC itself if not older. This is the level of world changing innovation that I'm talking about that I feel currently eludes China: http://www.swinnovation.co.uk/2011/05/southwest-celebrates-5...

The only place China has a huge advantage in is with biotech, since Western culture as a whole has a lot reservations with its advancement in certain taboo areas.