When discussing innovation, the Chinese like to tout the country’s “Four Great Inventions”—paper, gunpowder, the compass, and woodblock printing—and their enormous impacts on human civilization. Of course, that dates China’s creative peak at more than 1,000 years ago. When it comes to originating the great inventions of the last century—the semiconductor, the microprocessor, the Internet—China’s fingerprints are nowhere to be found.
