A top superbike reignites debate over Chinese innovation

In recent weeks, motorbike enthusiasts around the world have been speculating over when and whether they can get their hands on Chinese bikemaker ZXMOTO’s 820RR. 

The curiosity is understandable. In March, the very bike powered to victory at the Superbike World Championship in Portugal by a margin of nearly four seconds, marking the first time that a China-made bike took top honours.

No small feat after decades of dominance by European and Japanese superbike makers, such as Ducati, Kawasaki and Yamaha, whose comparable high-performance bikes are priced several times higher than the 820RR’s 40,000 yuan (S$7,470). 

Overnight, ZXMOTO founder Zhang Xue was propelled from relative obscurity to national stardom, with an explosion of media articles dissecting his life story and the reasons for his success. 

Mr Zhang’s story could be worth pondering to examine the kind of innovation power China has become and what it still lacks.

Today, China is home to globally competitive companies, from drones to telecommunications equipment, chemicals to machinery, robotics and electric vehicles (EVs).

These firms would not have achieved this level of success without a relentless focus on continuously improving products and achieving market share. 

In the past decade, China has steadily climbed the Global Innovation Index – which tracks metrics from research and development investment to patent filings – breaking into the top 10 countries for the first time in 2025, allowing it to shed its copycat label from yesteryears. 

Yet such progress masks a persistent critique that stands at the heart of its moral panic: that China excels at taking ideas from “one to a hundred” – scaling up production, refining hardware performance and commercialising products – but struggles to go from “zero to one” in creating truly original breakthroughs.

Catfish effect

Take for instance, ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot released in late 2022 by American AI firm OpenAI that brought generative AI into the mainstream. 

At that time, China had no comparable mass market product. Even Baidu’s Ernie – which was among the front runners in China — was only launched in 2023. 

This perceived gap triggered a sense of urgency. Every major tech company – from Alibaba to Meituan – began rolling out large language models, such that 2023 was described in Chinese media as a year-long “battle of a hundred models”. 

This pattern – rapid mobilisation after a breakthrough has been achieved elsewhere – gives fuel to the narrative that the US innovates, while China merely follows its lead.

Much soul-searching followed ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity. 

In a March 2023 interview with Chinese media, Professor Liang Zheng, who specialises in innovation policy at Tsinghua University, argued that China’s perceived strength in AI – measured in academic papers, patents and investments – did not mean that China was already neck and neck with the US in the technology.

Prof Liang’s diagnosis? ChatGPT was the product of a Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem comprising elements such as companies taking unconventional paths and the gathering of technical talent – one that China lacked. 

“Chinese enterprises rarely invest heavily in basic research,” he said.

“When we engage with the industry, the prevailing mindset is to wait until a trend shows promise before making large-scale investments and rapidly deploying applications.”

The EV industry, among the pride of China’s manufacturing today, offers another example. Chinese EVs, led by BYD, now rival or even surpass Tesla including in battery technology, self-parking features and annual sales. But it was the American company that first pushed EVs into the mainstream, helped by the opening of the Gigafactory in Shanghai in 2019. 

Even for Mr Zhang’s bike, Chinese news outlet Science and Technology Daily noted on April 13 that the achievement is about solving the “ten to a hundred” problem of engineering implementation, which is on the tail end of the innovation chain.

In other words, China has a proven ability in accelerating innovation in established technologies, but struggles with creating them in the first place.

Catching up

Beijing is painfully aware of the need to move up the innovation value chain – if mainly to achieve self-reliance and avoid being subjected to tech “strangleholds”, such as the United States’ export controls on semiconductors. 

A 2024 book by China International Capital Corporation investment bank, noted that China’s Five-Year Plans through to 2035 calls to shift its innovation model from “incremental” to “radical innovation”. 

“However, innovation activities in China are still dominated by incremental innovation... while basic research-based radical innovation activities remain insufficient,” it observed.

Efforts have been under way to change this: Increased R&D spending, stronger intellectual property protections, closer tie-ups between academia and industry, improved access to talent and capital, as well as efforts to reinvigorate the private sector.

Needed also are talented and brave arrowheads unafraid to take risks.

In his 2024 book, leading AI scientist Professor Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, advocated that the country must have the confidence to strike its own path in achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI. 

His institute is pioneering its own way of achieving AGI, which is regarded as the holy grail of AI development, where AI outperforms humans in a wide series of tasks and not just in narrow fields, as is currently the case. 

A Chinese path?

Critics will say that China still lacks a revolutionary product, like the iPhone, a disruptive innovation which redefined the smartphone market, although it did not invent the product category.

But in a sense, Chinese innovations have also changed the way we think about technology, while offering a different value proposition to consumers.

When DeepSeek surprised the world with its lower-cost, high-performance AI model in early 2025, the start-up punctured the prevailing idea that cutting-edge AI required access to the most powerful and pricey computer chips.

Shenzhen-headquartered Game Science scored a global hit with its 2024 Black Myth: Wukong, demonstrating that China can make a top-notch video game and compete in a creative field dominated by European and Japanese studios. 

And now, ZXMOTO’s 820RR shows high-performance engineering need not require premium pricing.

Though these are not “zero to one” breakthroughs, they represent an impactful and practical form of innovation – one that lowers costs, expands access, and reshapes markets from within.

None of all the innovations that have been awarded Science journal’s Breakthrough of the Year accolade since 1996 has been Chinese, not even the fast-tracked development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

But in 2025, the accolade was given to the “seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy” – an achievement only possible because of Chinese government policy and the relentless drive to cut costs among Chinese companies. 

Professor Wong Poh Kam, an expert in innovation strategy at the National University of Singapore’s Business School, said that the conventional framing of the issues by comparing China versus the United States or the advanced West may not be the most useful one. 

Innovation capability is not a uni-dimensional concept – where a less advanced country needs to catch up with a more advanced one, he told The Straits Times. “(It is) multi-dimensional; in fact, a key strategy of the late-comers is to innovate differently.”

“So the more interesting question should be: what is China doing differently and why?” 

Ultimately, it remains an open question whether China can deliver a complete breakthrough innovation; such disruptions naturally are infrequent.

But the seeds have been sown, and early shoots are appearing. It may be a mistake to view such cases as the limits of China’s innovation, rather than as potential building blocks for future success.