>> China’s progress economically and technologically has almost entirely been copying those innovations and competing on price due to poor labor and environment

>> China’s progress economically and technologically has almost entirely been copying those innovations and competing on price due to poor labor and environmental laws and conditions. That may have been true for a while when they were catching up. They are now leading R&D in a number of areas. They do have more issues (fraud, piling on co-authors) in published research, but there is a lot of legit stuff going on too. There are also cases where China has always been ahead of the US - flat panel displays have never really been manufactured in the U.S. for example. A lot of their innovations are also seen as "just cost reduction" on our end, but that still counts and is part of why they're still competitive even as their labor costs go up.