Why Chatbots like ChatGPT Weren't Invented in China - The New York Times

"The development of any significant technological product is inseparable from the system and environment in which it operates," said Xu Chenggang, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. He cited TikTok's Chinese-language sister app Douyin as the sort of innovation that Chinese companies might be unable to achieve in the future because of government limitations on the industry. "Once the open environment is gone, it will be challenging to create such products," he said. If a decade ago China was the wild, wild East for tech entrepreneurship and innovation, it's a very different country now. Starting in the 1990s all of the country's biggest tech companies were private enterprises funded with foreign money.