I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem, borrowing their IP.

Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.

As somebody whose career was linked to well being of the Chinese manufacturing sector I can say that manufacturing was on decline for quite a long time, with first symptoms appearing right at around 2009-2011.

The way the new mayor of Shenzhen ordered to bulldoze all factories in city center at around 2009-2010 shows how much esteem Chinese government has for entrepreneurship.

Can anybody imagine a governor of California ordering to bulldoze all silicon valley corporate campuses on a whim just because he wanted to have few hundreds more empty luxury shopping malls and 5 star hotels with blackjack and hookers?

Replacing SV corporate headquarters by skyscrapers would probably help lowering real estate prices a bit. And if Google had to rebuild their HQ it probably wouldn't even change quarterly income by a lot.

Entrepreneurial spirit generally doesn't emerge from standard formal education, but not much is done to suppress it, and there are often extracurriculars to encourage young entrepreneurs. Rote memorization also only gets you so far, often you get tested on how you arrived at an answer, not just on the answer itself. Understanding the process is just as important as knowing it.

Perhaps this is a bit like the schooling of Bolshevik Engineers versus American Engineers, the former had a much reduced curriculum that helped the USSR catch up in engineering talent on paper, meanwhile those engineers were missing key concepts that you need to understand to build planes, bridges and similar that won't spontaneously degrade.

Fun part is, high school is/was the other way. USSR curriculum was full of stuff that 99% of students wouldn't ever use. There was little incentive to use anything in practice. You had to memorise, pass test and then you can forget it. This practice continues to this day in big parts of ex-Soviet sphere. I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!". Yet Americans I meet remember what they learned and know who to put it to use. Meanwhile I don't remember jack shit :D

> I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!"

Can absolutely confirm this saying for Romania of the late '80s and throughout all of the '90s (so, even after the Wall had fallen).

It's still the same logic even today. Worst thing, updates programmes double down on pushing even more facts. While PISA scores are getting worse and worse. I guess it will take few generations to forget about glorious soviet schooling :(

You highlighted a very important. Getting degrees for sake of getting degrees.

This is a big thing in India too. People become engineers and then decide what they want to do.

My teachers and peers and even parents used to say this and I would always be mighty proud of it.

We got Shakespeare.