The de-emphasis of seniority in Chinese society is certainly a tangible benefit of the CR. The enforcement of hierarchical culture in South Korea and Japan continues to stifle creativity, innovation, and productivity. While China still lags its more hierarchical East Asian neighbors in most scientific and technological areas, I have no doubt that its workplace culture is inherently more dynamic and better at encouraging innovation. In my opinion, this holds true even in comparisons with Silicon Valley companies. This indirect legacy of the CR will prove to be a long-term advantage of Chinese companies over their international competitors. See: the dominance of DJI in the consumer drone industry. DJI simply out-innovated and outmaneuvered every one of its overseas competitors. Its products were not only cheaper but also more innovative. As a result, it now holds an effective monopoly over the international market (~70% share), with most other drone makers having exited the industry.

The open source community is still greatly lacking in China, but there are promising signs:

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/tencent-and-why-open-source-is-about-to-explode-in-china/

https://medium.com/inside-machine-learning/is-open-source-alive-in-china-3f606aafbd3b

Despite this, overall innovation across all sectors is growing at an unprecedented pace. The country’s drive for increased innovation somehow manages to press on successfully even in the absence of the benefits of open source. I do not see much of an open source community in the other East Asian nations (and historically open source was rarely embraced anywhere in the world), so perhaps this isn’t so surprising.

League of Legends is not the most popular game in China. The most popular game in China is actually Glory of Kings, a mobile game by Tencent whose concept is essentially the same as LoL. You should check out some in-game footage – the overall gameplay experience including graphics is actually somewhat comparable to LoL (also owned by Tencent), which never had spectacular graphics anyway since it was designed to be compatible with even the lowest-end desktop systems.

You misunderstand what I meant by technological leapfrog. It does not necessarily imply superior complexity or refinement – and even by those metrics, Chinese mobile games manage to deliver a level of experience that successfully draws profit from the country’s massive market of casual gamers, who far outnumber “hardcore” console or PC gamers unlike in the West.

This is what they do with Tianhe-1. Only civilian users and applications were mentioned. The two faster supercomputers in China are probably the ones the military uses.

http://english.cctv.com/2017/02/05/VIDEFGAJAuepjHp7WdWtLmli170205.shtml

Tianhe-2 (the subject of the SCMP article you linked) has since been upgraded and renamed Tianhe-2A. It is now 2x faster. The military’s main complaint was that it had been too slow, so presumably this is no longer a problem.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/09/20/china-arms-upgraded-tianhe-2a-hybrid-supercomputer/

I’ll provide two examples of promising recent cultural products from China (one video game currently in development, one highly acclaimed anime series still in production):

The development of this game transitioned from being a Skyrim mod to a full-fledged standalone RPG based on Unreal Engine 4. More info and released screenshots/video can be found on the developer’s Weibo: https://weibo.com/u/1587945737

This animation series produced by Tencent Pictures is based off a popular webnovel about e-sports. Otakus worldwide had a positive reception to the first season, which was released last year.

The predominance of mobile games in China has nothing to do with lack of creativity but rather the technological leapfrog effect. Chinese game developers reach a far greater audience and earn more revenue by developing mobile games, not PC or console ones. It also helps that mobile games based around the microtransaction revenue model require much less upfront investment to produce.

As for their indie art output, it seems you are not familiar enough with this scene in China. Homegrown webnovels, webcomics, and animation have enormous followings, and the quality of some of their recent output is not significantly far behind the standard of Japanese works.

Whenever I read opinions about the creativity of Chinese students from professors at presumably American universities, I immediately let out a jaded sigh. The vast majority of Westerners are incapable of objectively overcoming the combined effects of confirmation/selective bias and the intrinsic personality characteristics of Chinese. Let me disclose that I myself am Han Chinese by ethnicity, so feel free to dismiss my entire reply if you believe my arguments are invalid for this reason. I personally think anyone who does will forever be prone to underestimating East Asians, but hey, it keeps them mentally comfortable (or, from my perspective, complacent).

There are simply more Chinese studying these fields due to the cultural reasons you mentioned, so it should be unsurprising that the proportion you encounter who appear uninspired is higher than for other groups. Accordingly, you are more likely to encounter white American women interested in AI who have the “creative spark” simply because they are the cream of the crop; the ones who lacked the mettle or talent were already weeded out early on or were never interested in/pressured to study STEM in the first place. Your assessment of Chinese cheating falls under this bias as well and is thus invalid for evaluating Chinese creative ability, even if you can provide the research which you said supports you (hint: I doubt researchers could’ve controlled for level of parental pressure, i.e. forcing kids to stay in fields for which they are intellectually unsuited.)

As for personality characteristics, Chinese and other East Asians lean toward meekness and timidity in relationships with a power imbalance and a lack of social familiarity (the latter factor is particularly strong and often overpowers the need for the former in triggering this disposition), such as the one that dominates your experiences – between a student and a professor. Someone mentioned that there is a serious lack of chutzpah among Chinese and I agree. It’s not hard to imagine what specific cultural factors cause this difference between them and Jews/Westerners. On the other hand, they are generally more introverted and this may not be due to culture but rather genetics. However, as prominent American researchers on the subject have pointed out, introversion does not imply less colorful, vibrant, or original thought processes. Aside from introversion, social sensitivity is intrinsically higher among Chinese as well (the existence of “face” is likely ultimately motivated by genetics), and Chinese unfamiliar with the Anglo tradition of caustic humor invariably do not react well to it. Considering your profession again, language barrier is likely another factor contributing to your impression of them being intellectually lackluster.

Your remark implying the relative creative superiority of Japanese raises additional skepticism about your inability to overcome certain biases. It’s a common for Americans to assume the Japanese have a culture inherently better at fostering creativity than the Chinese due to the popular image of Japan in America, but I have done enough comparative research and had enough personal exchanges to conclude this assumption is definitely false. In fact, China’s much better at funding startups and creating tech unicorns than Japan. Japan’s independent VC culture hardly exists. Expect to see the next generation of innovative Asian tech companies arise in China, not Japan.

Since it’s doubtful that anyone who’s still skeptical about me and the Chinese will take my credentials seriously, I’ll omit any in-depth discussion of my overall experiences of working with ethnic Chinese (from all of Greater China and its SEA/Western diaspora). I’ll just leave you with the conclusion that my experiences are in accord with what I have laid out here, and I do not believe I am susceptible to biases of personal observation since I always make a conscious effort to overcome them. I also rank personal observation lower than researched information in my worldview. Anyway, I think the biggest takeaway to anyone reading this is that you shouldn’t judge a blank-faced, tight-lipped Chinese (also referred to in the past as the “inscrutable Oriental”) who gives short, clichéd answers as having few thoughts that are intellectually or creatively remarkable. Or, if you are so sure that most of the Chinese whom you have met do fit this description, that their disproportionate presence in your life implies a proportionally lower number of creative minds among all Chinese relative to all Anglos.