Frankly I think the only reason China copies and clones is because it’s the path of least resistance to profit. They have lax laws on IP protection. Ther is no reason to do R&D when you can just copy/clone and make just as much money with none of the risk.

And that’s probably the only reason. If push comes to shove, they can probably innovate if given proper incentives.

I heard the tale about the Japanese lens industry. For the longest time they made crap lens that were just clones of foreign designs until the Japanese government banned licensing of foreign lens designs forcing their people to design their own lens. Now they are doing pretty well in that industry if I’m right.