How many ground breaking innovations has China had? How many has the west had? Case in point, copying is not productive in the long run.
There are now entire product categories which come out of China and no-where else. Drones. Camera gymbals. Personal electric scooters. Heck, their entire system of government could be called "innovative" - certainly no-one else has ever tried that before.
Give it 20 years and it'll be onto the next developing country which is copying to catch up, and China will be amongst the lead innovators - if not, as I suspect, the easy winner.
Merrit Roe Smith, STS.050, MIT
Authoritarian one-party rule with a strongman at the top is nothing new, they just have newer tools to enforce it.
Gun powder?
Paper?
Movable type?
Clocks, compass, alcohol and on and on.
Really this is a 'What did the Romans ever do for us?' type of question.
Quite an impressive number. Enough to fill over 27 volumes in a project spanning nearly 70 years: Joseph Needham's epic Science and Civilisation in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
Learn to do it right (copy), then figure out how to do it better (innovate).
I happen to think an inexpensive copy of a useful product is far better than a newly invented product that’s expensive or less useful.
Example: Cheap generic drugs vs expensive patented name brands.
But to get to the root of your argument: accepting copying as normal does not mean "no innovation", but "different innovation". Does that mean ground-breaking stuff would pop up noticeably less often? Possibly. But it's also likely that once released these products would iteratively reach a higher level of quality than what we have now (I cannot equate "learning from the masters" with the existence of Windows 8 or Gnome 3, for example). Different paths, but headed the same way.