The Europeans invented the car and Ford mass produced it.

Yet, we see Ford as extremely innovative and revolutionary. I think we can draw lots of parallels between a 19th and early 20th century industrializing US and current China.

You may disparage TikTok as a Vine clone, but it redefined the state of the art for recsys algorithms. Google and Meta had to play catch-up with how quickly and how good TikTok is at discovering videos users find interesting out of the ocean of available content.