alt Hacker NewsI agree they’ve surpassed the west (or at least stopped solely playing catch up) in some areas.
But surely you can see how your upthread math of “250 years in 40 years” has a mix of mostly catch-up and replication and a sliver of novel innovation at the extreme tail end of that 250 year span?
I agree that the China experiment hasn't empirically disproven IP law for the reasons you go in it. And this thread has hit the usual problem that "IP laws" are very broad and cover everything from basic common sense around trademarks to the lunacy like the Amazon one-click patent.
But at issue here is there are IP laws that slow progress it should sit with the proponents of those laws to demonstrate that they are effective. And I don't see how anyone could come up with evidence for that - it is nearly impossible to prove that purposefully and artificially retarding progress actually speeds progress up. There are a lot of other factors at play and one of them is probably a more important factor than IP law. Odds are that putting artificial obstacles in the way of making sensible commercial decisions just slows everything down for no gain.
And kills the culture, it is sad the amount of cultural artefacts in the 1900s that have basically been strangled by IP laws. My family used to be part of a community choir before the copyright lawyers got to it.