They all check the box as successful entrepreneurs. What about innovation? Fiorina was half right. The Chinese are good at adapting other people’s ideas, adding value, and making tons of money in their home market – which is a valid form of “innovation”.

Take Tencent’s WeChat. It took its inspiration from WhatsApp, right down to a similar green logo, but developed it into a super app that enables 1 billion people to connect, shop, pay bills, buy food, and much more. In recent years, features of WeChat have been copied by western apps like Facebook.

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In Alibaba’s case, founder Jack Ma was inspired by an old school business model that connected buyers and sellers via ads in printed magazines. He adapted that into an online business that today is an e-commerce behemoth.

Alibaba is the owner of the Post.

But what about the original part of innovation? The world still needs unique inventions to keep tech progress moving forward. Examples over the past decades include the internet, mobile telephony, fibre optics, as well as entirely new business models like fabless semiconductor companies and sharing economy platforms like Uber and Airbnb.

The technology of fibre optics, the backbone of today’s broadband internet, was progressed separately by work done by Shanghai-born scientist Charles Kuen Kao and Indian physicist Narinder Singh Kapany, in the UK and US respectively. Fabless semiconductor companies, whose chips power today’s internet, were a business model enabled by Shanghai-born Morris Chang, who worked in the US chip industry for decades before establishing wafer foundry TSMC in Taiwan.

Clearly, ethnicity has nothing to do with being able to invent. So why aren‘t there more original tech inventions out of mainland China?

Put simply, in China today the emphasis is on Xi Jinping Thought, not free thought. Original inventors and rule breakers, the likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, thrive when they can think critically, question authority, defy the norms, be mavericks.

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Brilliant people generally want to get away from totalitarian rule, not embrace it. In the 1960s Karel Urbanek fled communist run Czechoslovakia for the US, where he developed new methods of defect inspection for semiconductors. His company, Tencor Instruments, would later merge with KLA to form what is today the No 3 chip equipment maker in the US.

As a child, Sergey Brin left Russia with his parents to settle in the US, fleeing anti-Semitism in the communist country. He would go on to co-found Google.

However, an independent study found that of the more than 750 participants in the Thousand Talents Plan in the first five years, 55 per cent of those who opted for part-time work in China were still living in the US, and their scientific publications were far superior to the full-time returnees.

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To be sure, the Trump Administration’s policies on restricting Chinese students studying in the US have distorted the equation – but all things being equal, bright students prefer to study in open societies, not repressed ones.

That said, many overseas educated Chinese return to launch start-up companies, seeing more opportunity for success in their homeland.

While working in the US, Robin Li developed a web search engine with page-ranking and site-scoring algorithms. Using that technology, he came back to China and started Baidu. Some of China’s promising AI start-ups, including Megvii, Yitu and Horizon Robotics – were founded by scientists who studied overseas or worked for multinational companies.

Another factor stifling innovation in China, especially in strategically important tech sectors like AI and semiconductors, is the government‘s top down approach. Beijing likes to anoint national champions and set specific goals tied to five and 10 year plans. While long term planning has advantages, history has shown that governments are not good at picking tech winners.

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Which brings us to the second challenge facing China’s tech industry today. As the country’s entrepreneurs try to replicate their success at home in overseas markets, they are facing major pushback, especially in the US.

TikTok and Huawei are two prime examples. Both were on track to become major success stories outside China but are now in retreat on the international stage. They are seen by the US government as national security risks because of their perceived links to Beijing – charges both companies deny. China’s world-leading drone maker DJI has faced similar pushback.

Tencent’s WeChat has also been targeted by an executive order from President Trump, and there has been speculation that Baidu and Alibaba may be next. Further, geopolitical tensions mean Chinese companies now face far greater scrutiny when it comes to overseas deals, effectively ending the opportunity to obtain advanced technology through acquisitions.

Beijing’s policies may have helped China’s tech companies grow big, but now that helping hand is hurting. The prospects for Chinese innovation and international tech success have never looked dimmer.

Craig Addison is a production editor on the Post’s tech desk in Hong Kong. From 2002 to 2009 he worked for SEMI, the Silicon Valley-based trade group representing semiconductor equipment and materials companies.