Tech's 'historic pivot' ends the era of US dominance

DeepSeek vs ChatGPT, Temu vs Amazon, TikTok vs Facebook, BYD vs Tesla China has gone from America’s copycat to its competitor, writes Anthony Cuthbertson

- Anthony Cuthbertson

Dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans, the head of the world's fastest-growing tech company stood on stage holding a new phone aloft. It was August 2012 - 10 months after Steve Jobs died and Xiaomi chief executive Lei Jun had decided to imitate the late Apple boss in both his outfit choice and the iPhonelooking device in his hand.

It was not the first knock-off to be unveiled in China that year. Other emerging startups like HiPhone, Goophone and Meizu all joined Xiaomi in creating cheap Apple clones – and it wasn’t just phones. Baidu was viewed as a poor imitation of Google, Alibaba was dismissed as China’s eBay, while Weibo was known as the Chinese version of Twitter.

The New York Times described China in 2013 as “a country where products like iPhones are made but rarely invented”, while Time magazine ran a 3,000-word article that year headlined “Why China Can’t Create Anything”.

“The innovation that takes place in China tends to build upon existing technology, not generate revolutionary ideas,” the article’s author wrote, referencing what is now referred to as China’s “copycat era”.

The Great Firewall of China, which kept the country’s internet separate from the rest of the world, meant that US tech companies rarely made their way into the country – but none left. There were no Chinese apps that became popular in the early days of the iPhone, nor any social networks that made a dent in English-speaking markets.

A 2014 article in the Harvard Business Review lamented how China had gone from a country that invented the compass, gunpowder and paper, to one that favoured imitation over innovation. The report concluded: “Can China lead? On this we have our doubts.”