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Comment by kev6168 | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, China is still full of tech copycats.

What they have done so far is applying western technologies/business models to the Chinese market, maybe some modifications here and there for the local culture and marketing schemes, but hardly innovative.

Now, can you name a few things coming out of China in the last twenty years that are relatively innovative and influential? Maybe things like Linux, Java, Netscape, Rails, Jquery, Twitter, Instagram, etc. The definitions for 'innovative' and 'influential' are up to you, I am just genuinely curious.

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Only thing that comes readily to mind is their passive radar system: http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/how-effective-is-chinas-new-a...

Arguably the Great Firewall is also something new, in that they apparently manage to exercise a measure of real control over 700M people (I suppose one could argue that Facebook does the same with it's users, though).

Wechat, High-speed train, Taobao's 11.11 sales, DJI Uav, Buses, hikvision, Foxit PDF, SPMC.

These may be great products that have advanced the state-of-the-art, but how is Wechat novel? It appears to be a pretty generic chat app similar to WhatsApp, which debuted a year earlier. Of course, almost all western products (including whatsapp) are derivative of something that came earlier too.

Oh Wechat is much more than a "generic chat app" -- it has payments and a third party app platform. Facebook messenger is trying to move in this direction too.

http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

You can transfer money with wechat.

Wechat has a eco system that links to your checking account. Therefore, you can pay your bills: Taxi, fresh fruit from street, pre-order movie seat while you are on the way. I had an two weeks no-wallet-challenge last year in china. The 3rd day I gave up, not because it doesn't work, but it sounds like documentary about surfing internet nonstop for 24 back to Y2K years.

payment: https://www.techinasia.com/day-with-wechat-payments-in-store...

movie: http://www.smartshanghai.com/articles/smsh/how-to-buy-movie-...

whatsapp, snapchat etc still not very close to wechat on these functions.

Looks pretty cool!

I used to be as sceptical as you are, until someone living in china for a decade explained to me people in business no longer exchange emails, but they exchange wechat contact via qr codes then have group work discussion in wechat.

Then, for the first time i thought novelty is coming from the east and not the west ( i live in europe).

The only last thing that gave me a tiny little bit of hope, was that even in China, the top scientists working on advanced R&D tech still come from the west. But for how long ? I would say max 5 years. I'm still betting on the next apple or google coming from china.

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