Let's play write the article that should have been written!
Here's my favorite example of Chinese innovation: the ESP8266. It is original hardware and 1/10th the price of the equivalent offering from TI (their CC3000), with more speed, more features and better reliability.
The esp8266 is cheap because they used expnsive to design, cheap to produce process(40nm). Quallcom had a similar chip(QCA4004 ?), probably with similar manufacturing costs, which they sold only to big companies, probably at a higher price.
Also when you come to judge that chip, don't forget china's interests in the chip industry and in security. I wouldn't be surprised those helped the esp to become reality.
The ESP8266 is an ingenious little chip. It's fully integrated - no external balun required unlike many of its competitors, no calibration by board manufacturers, just drop in and use. They reached the scales required to justify their NRE costs by making it a dual-use chip that could serve both as a a WiFi interface for cheap Android tablets and a standalone IoT design.
Cadence (Tensilica LX3 core) isnt exactly Chinese. What espressif did that was really smart was re-purposing design created as an SDIO WiFi chip for tablets into IoT darling, pretty much _by accident_ (someone in Shenzhen leaked SDK into english speaking website). There is a very strong unwritten rule among Chinese electronic firms of not leaking documentation outside the great wall, because that weakens their technological advantage (for example try finding documentation for one of chinese LCD scalers).
Here's my favorite example of Chinese innovation: the ESP8266. It is original hardware and 1/10th the price of the equivalent offering from TI (their CC3000), with more speed, more features and better reliability.