Jack Ma of Alibaba spent considerable time in the US, and enlisted US friends to develop Alibaba. Many Asians that have been through Western education become extremely creative. Not that I'm saying the Western/US education system is better (it has its problems, on the entirely opposite scale), but Western university culture helps bring people to their potential, while the university culture in Asian countries is a continuation of high school (hard to get into, extremely easy to get out).
I work regularly with Chinese companies, and if you were to go to an equipment manufacturer in China, you'd notice they practically use the same designs, block diagrams, software for the same product. It's all exactly the same. You might also recall that the mandatory filtering software used by the Chinese government was plagiarized. Or the Cisco firmware. IP has serious problems in China.
Japanese cellphones, for instance, were way ahead of the curve on the merits of specs. But that isn't true anymore. Japan, like other Asian countries, have a difficult time with creativity not because they're less talented, but because the culture doesn't help bring ideas to fruition.
To cite the field of software and content for examples is a mistake, I believe, because it's based on a presupposition that IP can't, won't, or shouldn't approach zero cost. If I were a Chinese administrator, I wouldn't care much if the blogging software my people were using was a clone of something from the West nearly as much as I'd be concerned that their creativity of expression was kept within the bounds of the Greater Good.