I can't agree with you. I am in the USA. I had dinner last night with several people talking about starting up an AI/medical company. When I got home, I found companies in China that were already shipping similar products to what we had just been talking about at dinner, just as possible ideas.

My fields are NLP and deep learning, and from my perspective, research papers coming out of China have been innovative and high quality in the areas I am interested in. That is to take nothing away from the spectacular NLP deep learning models that Facebook and Google have recently been publishing and sharing. Just because we have very good tech, that does not mean that our competitors don't also have advanced technologies.