A dogfight in the world of drones was about to begin. It was November 2016, and Da-Jiang Innovations Science and Technology, better known as DJI, was preparing to launch its killer new product: the Mavic Pro. Weighing just 1.6 pounds, the Mavic was compact enough to fit into a book bag and featured a four-mile flight range and a built-in camera capable of shooting pin-sharp 4K video from hundreds of feet up. Though priced below $1,000, the Mavic sported sophisticated gimbals to stabilize the camera and cutting-edge software enabling it to lock on subjects and follow them around, detect and avoid midair obstacles, and automatically return to its launch point before running out of power.

The executives at DJI knew they had a great product. But would it sell? DJI had little brand recognition even in China, and Mavic was its first product for mainstream consumers. Moreover, DJI was up against a formidable roster of U.S. and European competitors flocking to market with similar devices—including Parrot, a 22-year-old French electronics manufacturer; Lily Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup that raised $15 million on Kickstarter; and GoPro, the maker of portable action cameras. How would DJI’s technology fare vs. the best in the West?

It wasn’t even a close contest.

DJI president Roger Luo says he knew immediately they had a winner—and a huge production challenge. Within three days of release, DJI had received three times more orders for the Mavic than it had expected to sell the entire month.

Meanwhile, the drone contenders from the West fell back to earth one by one. Parrot was the first to surrender, announcing in January it was axing workers from its drone division. Then Lily revealed that, despite collecting more than $34 million in preorders, it had burned through all its cash and would close without shipping a single unit. The real surprise was GoPro. The San Mateo, Calif., company had established its brand by selling more than 20 million “wearable” cameras. And CEO Nick Woodman had vowed GoPro would return to profitability with the release of a heavily marketed drone called Karma. But the Karma, it turns out, was bad—heavier and slower than its Chinese rival, and lacking its tracking or detect-and-avoid capabilities. Worse, the first Karmas had an alarming tendency to lose power and drop from the sky. After an embarrassing recall, GoPro relaunched in February. By then, DJI had taken off.

Fast-forward to today, and DJI controls more than 70% of the commercial drone market, a category that could soar to $15 billion by 2022, according to global research firm Interact Analysis, up from $1.3 billion last year. With venture funding from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, DJI has a valuation of $10 billion. The company doesn’t disclose financial results, but it has been widely estimated by analysts that sales this year will exceed $1.5 billion, with earnings approaching $500 million.

DJI has been hailed by many electronics industry analysts as the “Apple of consumer drones.” But the comparison is misleading. Unlike Apple (aapl, +0.01%), which proudly proclaims its products are “Designed in California, Assembled in China,” DJI products are designed and manufactured in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, which today has no equal for sourcing the rotors, transmitters, batteries, and other components in DJI products.

DJI’s success highlights one of the global economy’s most momentous transformations: China, after a century of subordination to foreign nations, three decades of isolation under Mao Zedong, and three decades of “opening and reform” measures initiated by Deng Xiaoping, is returning to its historical position as one of the world’s great centers of innovation and technological development.

Until only a few years ago, talk of China as an innovator would have elicited scorn from most Western business and government leaders. The country was widely derided as a haven for copycats and pirates, or grudgingly acknowledged as an efficient manufacturing platform whose factories depended on the uneasy union of cheap Chinese labor and foreign technology.

Business in China today, however, is being led by innovation-obsessed execs like Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei Technologies, which last year filed more patent applications than any other company in the world. And Allen Zhang, who led the team that developed Tencent’s WeChat, the smartphone app that allows its 900 million users to chat, shop, pay, play, and do just about anything else. And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, the Beijing-based search company, who has vowed to have autonomous vehicles ready for sale in China by next year.

“The copycat era is behind us,” says venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China. “We are way beyond that.”

Their success is fueling a virtuous cycle of innovative activity. The country’s two largest Internet companies, Alibaba Group (baba, +0.72%) and Tencent Holdings (tcehy, -2.11%), lead the world in e-commerce, mobile payments, social media, and online gaming. They and other Chinese tech giants are investing aggressively in new businesses, helping to transform China into a massive market for venture capital investments. Those ventures, in turn, are nourished by China’s huge and growing market and its unique ecosystem of suppliers, logistics specialists, and manufacturers. The result: China has spawned a new generation of homegrown entrepreneurs who are creating world-class products, developing their own technologies, and rolling out new business models on a scale and with a speed the global economy has never seen. “The copycat era is behind us,” says Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures and the former head of Google China. “We are way beyond that.”

Consider that between 2014 and 2016, China attracted $77 billion in venture capital investment, compared with just $12 billion in the preceding two years. China is now among the world’s top three markets globally for venture capital in digital technologies including virtual reality, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, drones, and artificial intelligence. And about a third of the world’s 262 “unicorns” (startups valued at more than a billion dollars) hail from China, according to McKinsey & Co., and account for 43% of the global value of such companies.

2016年11月，无人机领域即将迎来一场混战。当时，大疆创新科技有限公司（Da-Jiang Innovations Science and Technology，DJI）准备发布一款新型杀手级产品：Mavic Pro。Mavic体积小巧，重量仅有1.6磅，足以装进书包里，航程四英里，内置摄像机能够从数百英尺的高空拍摄清晰的4K视频。Mavic虽然定价不到1,000美元，但其尖端平衡环可保持摄像机稳定，先进的软件使摄像机可以锁定和跟踪拍摄对象，检测和避开空中的障碍物，并且可在电力耗尽之前返回发射地点。

大疆高管很清楚它们的产品非常优秀。但它能否热卖？大疆当时即使在中国也没有太高的品牌知名度，Mavic是其第一款面向主流消费者的产品。另外，大疆还要面对美国和欧洲诸多强大的竞争对手，这些公司也推出了类似产品 — 包括有22年历史的法国电子设备制造商派诺特（Parrot）； 在Kickstarter上融资1,500万美元的硅谷初创公司Lily Robotics； 以及移动运动摄像机制造商GoPro。大疆的技术如何与西方最优秀的同行竞争？

这甚至不是一场势均力敌的竞赛。

大疆总裁罗镇华表示，他很快就知道他们拥有一款致胜的产品，并且面临严峻的生产挑战。在Mavic发布三天后，大疆收到的订单数量，比其最初预期的整月销量多了三倍。

与此同时，来自西方的无人机竞争对手却纷纷坠落。最先放弃的是派诺特，其在一月份宣布将对无人机部门进行裁员。之后，Lily宣布，虽然公司收到了价值超过3,400万美元的预订订单，但公司的现金已经耗光，将关闭公司业务，没有交付一件产品。真正令人意外的是GoPro。这家来自加州圣马特奥的公司售出了超过2,000万部“可穿戴”摄像机，由此树立起了公司的品牌。公司CEO尼克·伍德曼曾经承诺，GoPro通过发布一款大肆炒作的无人机Karma，能够恢复盈利。但结果证明，Karma很糟糕，不论重量还是速度均落后于中国竞争对手，而且并不具备跟踪或检测躲避功能。更糟糕的是，首批Karma出现了令人不安的状况：突然失去动力后从空中坠落。经过尴尬的产品召回之后，GoPro在2月份重新发布了这款产品。但此时，大疆已经起飞。

到今天，大疆已经控制了商用无人机市场超过70%的份额，据全球研究公司Interact Analysis报道，该市场的规模到2022年将达到150亿美元，而在去年还仅有13亿美元。在获得Accel Partners和红杉资本（Sequoia Capital）的风险投资之后，大疆的估值达到100亿美元。虽然大疆并未公布其财务业绩，但分析师普遍预测，大疆今年的销售额将超过15亿美元，收益接近5亿美元。

大疆被许多电子行业分析师称赞为“消费级无人机领域的苹果公司”。但这种对比其实存在误导性。苹果（Apple）一直自豪地宣称其产品“于加利福尼亚州设计，在中国组装”，而与其不同的是，大疆产品均在中国深圳设计和生产，从深圳采购转子、信号传送器、电池和其他组件，大疆在这里拥有无可匹敌的资源。

大疆的成功显示出全球经济最重要的转变之一： 中国经历了一个世纪的外国侵略，毛泽东时代三十年的孤立以及由邓小平发起的三十年的“改革开放”，正在重新成为全球创新和科技发展的核心之一。

几年前，如果有人说中国是创新者，肯定会招来多数西方商业和政府领导人的蔑视。中国被许多人嘲笑为山寨和盗版的天堂，或者被勉强承认是高效率的生产平台，因为中国的工厂只是依靠廉价的中国劳动力和外国技术。

但今天中国商界的领袖是热衷于创新的企业高管，例如：华为技术公司（Huawei Technologies）的创始人任正非。去年华为提交了全球最多的专利申请。腾讯（Tencent）微信开发团队的负责人张小龙。微信这款智能手机应用，使9亿用户可以聊天、购物、支付、玩游戏和做其他任何事情。北京搜索公司百度（Baidu）的CEO李彦宏，他承诺明年在中国发售自动驾驶汽车。

谷歌中国（Google China）原负责人、风险投资家李开复表示：“山寨的时代已经成为过去。我们早已超越了那个阶段。”

他们的成功推动了创新活动的良性循环。中国最大的两家互联网公司阿里巴巴集团（Alibaba）和腾讯控股，已经成为全球电子商务、移动支付、社交媒体和在线游戏领域的佼佼者。这两家公司和其他中国科技业巨头正在大力投资新公司，帮助中国变为一个庞大的风险资本投资市场。而中国庞大的、持续发展的市场和独特的供应商、物流公司与制造商生态系统，则为这些公司提供了成长的土壤。结果就是： 中国培养出了新一代的本土企业家，他们将创造出世界级的产品，开发属于自己的技术，推出全新的商业模式，他们将以全球经济前所未见的规模和速度增长。谷歌中国原负责人、风险投资家李开复表示：“山寨的时代已经成为过去。我们早已超越了那个阶段。”

在2014年至2016年期间，中国吸引了770亿美元风险投资，而之前两年仅有120亿美元。目前，在全球数字技术风险投资市场中，中国已经进入前三，包括虚拟现实、自动驾驶汽车、3D打印、无人机和人工智能等。据麦肯锡公司（McKinsey & Co.）统计，全球262家“独角兽公司”（估值超过10亿美元的初创公司）约三分之一来自中国，而且中国独角兽公司占全球独角兽公司总估值的43%。

To explore the implications of this high-speed economic evolution, Fortune will be convening business leaders from around the globe in Guangzhou, China, in early December at a pair of events: the Fortune Global Forum and the Brainstorm Tech International conference.

“China and the U.S. are the world’s only true technology superpowers,” says Richard Ji, cofounder and managing partner of Asia All-Stars Investment, a Hong Kong–based and technology-focused investment fund that has invested in some of China’s most successful tech companies. “No other economies come even close.”

China’s rising class of innovators benefits from several built-in advantages. One is the vast scale of China’s market, which drives powerful efficiencies as new products and services are rolled out to hundreds of millions of people. Another is that Chinese consumers are enthusiastic adapters of new technologies, and that entrepreneurs operate in a developing market unencumbered by legacy infrastructure. China’s shoppers have taken quickly to online shopping and digital payments in part because they didn’t have to unlearn habits of shopping at traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

China overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest market for e-commerce in 2015. This year online sales are expected to top $1.1 trillion, according to eMarketer, a data research firm. McKinsey says China alone now accounts for nearly half of worldwide e-commerce—up from less than 1% only a decade ago. Goldman Sachs expects online retail sales in China to grow at an annual average of 23% over the next four years, topping $1.7 trillion by 2020.

While government meddling in the private sector may be a negative for China’s overall growth, in many cases regulatory flexibility, or nonchalance, has encouraged innovation. ¬China’s banking officials turned a blind eye as Tencent, an online gaming company, experimented with an app that used QR codes to facilitate digital payments—and as Alibaba, an e-commerce company, developed Alipay, its own online payment system, and then Yu’e Bao, an online investment fund for Alipay users. The result is that China, the land where paper money was invented, is now rapidly going cashless. And Yu’e Bao, in little more than a year, has become the largest mutual fund in the world.

A final advantage is China’s indifferent attitude toward privacy and antitrust rules. It enables Chinese tech giants to collect and analyze data not only from a huge number of consumers, but also in a way that allows the companies to know the minute details of their customers’ lives: where they live, where they travel, where they shop, what they buy, what music they like, who they socialize with, what kind of health care they’re receiving.

Well before the rollout of Apple’s iPhone X, which features Face ID technology, Alibaba’s financial services affiliate, Ant Financial, began allowing its 450 million users to log in to their online wallets by taking a selfie. Internet giant Baidu, China Construction Bank, and ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing use the technology to identify employees as well as customers. Ant is steadily extending the use of its “Sesame Credit” system, which assigns customers a “financial reliability” score according to criteria such as their online spending records and how regularly they pay their utility bills or credit cards. The ranking even factors in the scores of acquaintances.

So far, however, Chinese customers don’t seem worried about the loss of privacy, as long as such personalized technologies make their lives far more convenient.

While venture capital continues to pour into China, it is beginning to flow the other way too. The country’s technology behemoths have global ambitions. And increasingly they are taking their battles with each other overseas—in the form of VC investments outside China. Alibaba’s U.S. investments, for example, include Snap, Lyft, and the Florida augmented-reality startup Magic Leap. Alibaba spent $1 billion last year to secure a major stake in Singapore-based Lazada, the largest e-commerce company in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Ant Financial holds shares in PayTM, the largest ride-sharing venture in India, and has snapped up stakes in fintech companies in Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Last month, Alibaba announced that in addition to those strategic investments, it plans to spend $15 billion over the next three years to strengthen its global research and development capabilities and will establish laboratories for deep research in seven locations including San Mateo; Bellevue, Wash.; Moscow; Tel Aviv; and Singapore.

为了探索这种高速经济发展的影响，《财富》杂志将于12月初在中国广州召集全球商业领袖，共同出席两个活动：财富全球论坛和财富头脑风暴国际科技大会。

香港亚洲全明星投资（Asia All-Stars Investment）的创始人兼主理合伙人季卫东表示：“中国和美国是世界上唯一的真正的科技超级大国。其他经济体与中美两国相比相去甚远。”亚洲全明星投资是一家专注科技领域的投资基金，投资了中国最成功的多家科技公司。

中国不断增多的创新者得益于内在的一些优势。首先，中国有庞大的市场，新产品和服务面对着数以亿计的消费者，因此效率大大提高。其次，中国消费者热衷于采用新技术，而且发展中市场的创业者不会受到传统基础设施的阻碍。中国的消费者很快接受了网上购物和数字支付，部分原因是他们不必摆脱在传统实体店中购物的习惯。

数据研究公司eMarketer称，中国在2015年取代美国成为全球最大的电子商务市场。2017年的在线销售额有望达到1.1万亿美元。麦肯锡表示，目前中国占全球电子商务市场的近一半，而十年前这一比例不足1％。高盛（Goldman Sachs）预计，未来四年，中国在线零售额年均增长率将达到23％，到2020年将达到1.7万亿美元。

尽管政府对民营部门的干涉可能会对中国的整体增长产生一些负面影响，但在许多情况下，监管灵活性或放任的态度都鼓励了创新。¬在线游戏公司腾讯试用了一款使用二维码进行数字支付的应用程序，而电商公司阿里巴巴，开发了自己的在线支付系统支付宝（Alipay），后来又推出了余额宝（Yu’e Bao），作为支付宝用户的在线投资基金，中国的银行业官员对此均视而不见。结果是作为最早发明纸币的中国，现在正快速无现金化。余额宝在一年多的时间里，成为世界上最大的共同基金。

最后一个优势是中国对隐私和反垄断规则的漠不关心。这使得中国科技巨头不仅可以收集和分析海量消费者的数据，还允许这些公司了解客户的生活细节： 他们住在哪里，去了哪里，在哪里购物，买过什么，他们喜欢什么音乐，他们与谁交往，他们接受什么样的医疗保健等等。

早在苹果推出采用Face ID技术的iPhone X之前，阿里巴巴的金融服务机构蚂蚁金服（Ant Financial）就已经开始允许其4.5亿用户通过自拍登录自己的在线钱包。互联网巨头百度，中国建设银行（China Construction Bank）和叫车服务公司滴滴出行（Didi Chuxing）利用这一技术来识别员工和客户。蚂蚁金服正在稳步扩大“芝麻信用”系统的用途。“芝麻信用”以客户的在线消费记录和定期支付水电费或偿还信用卡的情况等为标准，为客户提供“财务可靠性”评分。信用评分甚至会考虑熟人的评分。

但到目前为止，只要这些个性化的技术能够提高生活便利度，中国的客户似乎就不会担心隐私被暴露。

在风险投资不断涌入中国的同时，中国的投资也不断地向海外出走。中国的科技巨头都有进军全球的野心。越来越多的中国企业开始通过风险投资的形式，加入海外市场的争夺。例如，阿里巴巴在美国的投资包括Snap、Lyft和佛罗里达的增强现实创业公司Magic Leap。去年，阿里巴巴斥资10亿美元，收购了新加坡东南亚最大电商公司Lazada的多数股份。与此同时，蚂蚁金服持有印度最大叫车服务公司PayTM的股份，并收购了韩国、泰国、菲律宾和印度尼西亚的金融科技公司的股份。

阿里巴巴上个月宣布，除这些战略投资外，计划在未来三年斥资150亿美元来加强其全球研发能力，并将在圣马特奥、华盛顿贝尔维、莫斯科、特拉维夫和新加坡等七个城市建立实验室，开展深入研究。

Rival Tencent, for its part, has snared stakes in Snap, Tesla, and an Indian message app called Hike Messenger. Last year, Tencent paid $8.6 billion to gain control of Finland’s Supercell, bolstering Tencent’s position as the world’s leading provider of online games. In Southeast Asia, the company has invested in Sea, an online gaming, shopping, and mobile payment portal that is the region’s most valuable startup, and Go-Jek, the biggest ride-sharing service in Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Alibaba and Tencent are bankrolling competing dockless bike-sharing companies that launched this year in scores of overseas cities including Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Nagoya, Japan; Singapore; and Sydney. (In Shanghai, meanwhile, abandoned bicycles from Tencent-backed bike-sharing startup Mobike and Alibaba-backed Ofo have become so numerous that authorities impounded thousands of them earlier this year. Chalk it up to growing pains.) But the two have joined forces in ride sharing. Both are investors in Didi Chuxing, which owns stakes in ride-sharing ventures in Europe, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

“China’s tech companies are determined to expand globally, and that determination will only grow,” says Connie Chan, partner at California venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In years to come, she argues, “every company will need a China strategy,” whether they do business in the Middle Kingdom or not.

As spectacular as China’s progress in innovation may be, skeptics cite a long list of shortcomings. China, the world’s most voracious consumer of semiconductors, has been trying to build a domestic chip industry since the 1970s, and yet the country still imports 10 times more microchips than it can produce. The nation’s drugmakers lag far behind Western counterparts. And executives at Boeing (ba, +0.25%) and Airbus are hardly losing sleep over the prospect of competition from China’s state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), which unveiled in May the C919, the nation’s third attempt to build a commercial passenger jet.

In a detailed 2015 assessment of Chinese innovation, the ¬McKinsey Global Institute identified four categories of innovation: consumer-led (such as e-commerce, mobile payments, or online financial services), manufacturing-led (the production of consumer electronics or automobiles), engineering-led (such as the construction of high-speed railways), and research-led (for example, breakthroughs in the manufacture of semiconductors or the development of pharmaceuticals). The report’s conclusion: China is already a global innovation leader in the first two categories and “has the potential” to become a world leader in the latter two.

而阿里巴巴的竞争对手腾讯则收购了Snap、特斯拉（Tesla）和印度信息应用Hike Messenger的股份。去年，腾讯以86亿美元获得了芬兰公司Supercell的控制权，从而巩固了腾讯作为全球领先在线游戏提供商的地位。在东南亚地区，腾讯分别投资了在线游戏、购物与移动支付门户Sea和印尼最大叫车服务公司Go-Jek。Sea是东南亚地区最有价值的初创公司。

与此同时，阿里巴巴和腾讯分别投资了相互竞争的无桩共享单车公司。这些公司今年在华盛顿特区、旧金山、日本名古屋、新加坡和悉尼等数十个海外城市投放了共享单车。（与此同时，在上海，腾讯投资的共享单车初创公司摩拜（Mobike）和阿里巴巴投资的Ofo报废了大量自行车，导致政府部门不得不在今年早些时候扣押了数千辆单车。这算是成长的烦恼。）但这两家公司在叫车服务行业却进行了合作。两家公司均投资了滴滴出行。滴滴出行在欧洲、印度、东南亚、中东和非洲的叫车服务公司均持有股份。

加州风险投资公司安德森·霍洛维茨（Andreessen Horowitz）的合伙人陈梅陵表示：“中国科技公司决心在全球范围内扩张，而这一决心只会持续增强。”她认为，未来几年，“每个公司都需要有中国战略”，不管他们是否在中国开展业务。

尽管中国在创新方面的进步令人惊叹，对怀疑论者也可能会列举出一大堆不足之处。中国是世界上最大的半导体消费国，自上世纪70年代以来，中国一直在尝试建立国内芯片产业，但中国微芯片进口量依旧是国内产量的10倍以上。中国的制药企业远远落后于西方同行。而波音（Boeing）和空中客车（Airbus）的高管根本不需要为中国国有商用飞机公司（Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China，COMAC）的竞争前景担忧。中国商用飞机公司（COMAC）在5月份发布了C919，这是中国第三次尝试建造商用客机。

在2015年对中国创新的详细评估报告中，麦肯锡全球研究所（McKinsey Global Institute）提出了四个创新类别： 客户中心型创新（如电子商务、移动支付或在线金融服务），效率驱动型创新（消费电子产品或汽车生产），工程技术型创新（如高速铁路建设），科学研究型创新（如半导体制造或药物研发的突破）。报告的结论是： 中国已经是前两类的全球创新领导者，并且“有潜力”成为后两类的全球领先者。