The Swiss watchmaking industry was once largely focused on producing cheap copies of English and French watches. Today Swiss watchmakers are renowned for quality and innovation.

And going even farther back, the British industrial revolution was built on producing cheap copies of Indian textiles.

And the label "Made in Germany" was once created by the British to protect their own manufacturing from cheap clones from Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany

... using machines that british people invented.

get the overall point, but not sure this is a good example.

US copied british factories by industrial espionage to bootstrap their own industry and eventually became the bigger industrial producer...

"On December 20, 1790, water-powered machinery for spinning and carding cotton was set in motion in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Based on the designs of English inventor Richard Arkwright, a mill was built by Samuel Slater on the Blackstone River. The Slater mill was the first American factory to successfully produce cotton yarn with water-powered machines. Slater was a recent English immigrant who apprenticed Arkwright's partner, Jebediah Strutt.

Samuel Slater had evaded British law against emigration of textile workers in order to seek his fortune in America. Considered the father of the United States textile industry, he eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island."

https://www.thoughtco.com/richard-arkwright-water-frame-1991...

I think that is specifically the point. The copycats automate and improve, then dominate.

Well, they were cheaper because the industrial revolution was basically the British inventing the textile industry.

In the 1980s, electronics that said "Made in Japan" were well-regarded (still are today), but in the 1950s it was the opposite: they were seen as cheap. This was actually a joke in the movie Back to the Future.

See also Japanese cars from the 1970s versus the 1990s to today.

Same thing with electric guitars.

In the 60 and early 70ies, Made in Japan guitars, specially copies of Gibson and Fender guitars where not well regarded.

But they started to greatly improve, and by the late 70ies and 80ies they were equal if not better than their originals (specially Fender which was not well managed by CBS at the time).

In the copy department you still have brands like Burny/Fernandez or Tokai, and also brands that outgrew the simple copy business with genuine models such as Ibanez, Yamaha or Takamine (a few lawsuits may have helped them develop in that direction).

Once upon a time German and Japanese manufacturers were laughed at as mere copies too.

There's a lot to be said for letting someone else spend billions perfecting a design and then just copying it. If you can do it quickly and make improvements you'll maintain second place very cheaply, which let's you spend the rest of your resources on more useful things.

I'm still hoping the UK's space strategy (satellites and SABRE excepted) is about playing the extremely long game.

I'm sure this kind of thinking contributed to American drone companies getting their asses handed to them by DJI

It's intriguing to see that during the last 3 decades, China has made so much progress, and from a historical perspective, I think China will make its own plane, just like how they made their own cars and trains, I do think they have the ability to reverse engineer the plane related stuff,sooner or later, but innorvaton is another thing, it totally make sense to me that China wants to copycat all the high tech stuff, and also, the counter massure that US took is totally reasonable. From the human species' point of view, it is fascinating.

If you look at the top computer systems and networking conferences, you'll see an increasing fraction of the research is from the top Chinese universities. The best Chinese students used to go abroad for their PhD studies. In the last five years or so, this has significantly changed, and Chinese home-grown research is just as innovative as US or European research. I've no reason to believe that aerospace will be any different, except that the lead times are probably quite a bit longer.

5G patents by country…

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

Answer: yes.

You shouldn't treat China as a single entity. The question should be whether the Chinese people can come up with the design.

Given time, resources, and education, certainly Chinese people can come up with functional solutions to any problem. The same is true for people of practically any other country.

But it seems that for one reason or other, technology theft is attractive enough to be a primary method of "innovating" in some places.

It's really a matter of degrees. People copy anything they see that seems like a good idea (better than the idea they previously had). It's just a matter of how much original effort is put in vs how much detail from the other party's effort is acquired and used to fast-track the development.

In complex projects like this, just seeing provides limited benefit. But in other simpler cases, just see another's working model can convey enough information for the newcomer to quickly come up to speed and compete.

You know, I have nothing against China building things from scratch on their own. I'm sure there are engineers in China who disdain all these espionage efforts and want to do their own original works, but are forced to "make use" of the information.

Didn't you see the news they are making a 1000Kph train?