I doubt it. Chinese system only works when they are playing catch up. There is no incentive for being a pioneer in a culture where IP is not protected. The system doesn't work when they need to push above everyone else.
China has a different IP culture with some striking similarities to open source culture. Knowledge and expertise is shared through trusted peer networks (guanxi) for mutual benefit. I share what I know with you, on the expectation that you'll share what you know with me. Being particularly smart or innovative has real but intangible value, because it elevates your status within that peer network. Likewise, if you have a reputation as a parasite then you'll quickly find yourself being marginalised.
This culture powers a very rapid cycle of iterative improvement. You can't rest on your laurels, you can't milk one innovation for the duration of a patent, you can't use an IP portfolio to block new entrants to the market. You have to keep innovating to stay relevant, you have to build and maintain a reputation for quality and value with every product, otherwise someone will eat your lunch.
If Western companies can't get past the stereotype of Chinese companies as lazy copycats, they have no long-term future. Shenzhen is full of smart, motivated people who are moving up the value chain at an alarming pace with innovative products and an innovative way of doing business.
And yet mobile payments are integrated into Chinese e-commerce with the frictionlessness that Apple Pay and the others can only dream of.
Who defines what "pioneer" is? Is SV not "pioneering" because the vast majority of its companies are trying to be Salesforce and not Uber?
Unclear how QR has meaningfully less friction than NFC solutions.
QR payment exemplifies the sort of innovation that is powering China's growth and that American companies profoundly fail to understand. It isn't sexy, but it works well enough to become ubiquitous. America is just barely catching up with a two generation old payment technology (chip & pin), while China have leapfrogged them with a worse-is-better solution.
I have worked with anti-fraud teams at Alibaba and other unnamed large Chinese firms. This is extremely far from the truth, and shoulder surfing QR scanning scams have been in the national news in China many times. NFC tags are cheap and already being proposed for scooters, etc.
QR proliferation is again enabled mostly by the fact that there is no incumbency advantage, not because they're better innovations. Even you admit they aren't, and you don't seem to fully understand how bad QR is as a payment media. Imagine Square's uptake in American SMBs and then mentally map that almost every Chinese retailer is or recently was an SMB. That's simply what's happening.
I don't harbor the notion that the US is particularly advanced, especially in standardized infrastructure, but pointing to QR as an example of Chinese innovation is not convincing.
And yes, Japanese mail order magazines came with idea of "offline Internet shopping" back in nineties, in era of flatbed scanners
Just see how long it's taking the US do adopt card chips & PINs while other countries that got their automated banking systems later are almost fully converted.
Mobile payments seem way easier to adopt in China and African countries because what existed before was so bad.
That’s not a technology problem, that’s a political problem.
This is a poor example. You would have been better off going with high-speed rail, although even that is mostly a cultural problem - the cost is not in trains, but land displacement.
Chinese are extremely flexible and in China today you can innovate and just try about anything you want.
Of course there are red lines that are quite obvious, but beyond that it's actually often freer than in the West.
The Chinese system and culture are complex and cannot be brushed in black and white.
We've gotten lazy.. I think we have this coming to us.
This is demonstrably false https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
If it’s low enough to be recouped while other players are trying to catch up, then IP or not companies will innovate.