This claim gets made a lot, especially by China's government in it's "four great modern inventions" marketing campaign. [1]

I don't get it. None of those are Chinese inventions. They're all technologies China adopted really fast. It's a testament to market size, development speed and certain idiosyncrasies about Chinese demographics, etc. But it has nothing to do with invention or innovation.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/tech/2017-08/08/conten...

WeChat has almost 1 billion active user, operating any system to support customer base that big requires innovations and inventions at various levels. for example, WeChat group published quite a lot high quality papers regarding their backend systems, the latest one probably being the VLDB 2017 paper on their PaxosStore capable of handling billions of strong consistency queries a second. This puts WeChat at the same level of Facebook, twitter, etc regarding innovation/invention.

Remember that comment, because it applies even better to everything e.g. Apple or Uber, notoriously "innovative" companies, are doing.

Indeed. Remember the infamous comment by CmdTaco on slashdot when Apple released the iPod:

> No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

What's worth more, inventing something or commercializing it? It sounds a bit like USA vs Israel. Israel invents a lot while the US commercializes on a bigger scale.

If the US isn't very good at developing new products because of burdensome regulations, small market size, slowness, demographics, etc. then maybe it's just not very good at technology. Other countries are bad at technology because of poor education, access to finance, skill of workers, culture, etc. They're still bad at technology, whatever the reason.

I think the point though is that it's only fair to compare companies when they compete head to head in similar markets.

It isn't that interesting to say China has a huge mobile payments market dominated by Chinese companies when that is almost entirely due to a lack of an existing CC infrastructure.

It is interesting when Chinese network companies (Huawei, TP-link, etc.) are able to out-compete US based companies in their home market.

> What's worth more, inventing something or commercializing it?

And hasn't been "successfully commercializing inventions, no matter who invented it" been a staple of the US economical success for decades, nay, over a century?