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
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.