Pakistan, July 24 -- In 2011, something quietly historic happened in the corridors of the World Intellectual Property Organization. For the first time, China filed more patent applications than the United States. Western analysts shrugged. They called it a numbers game, insisting that quality still resided firmly in American hands. Fifteen years on, the numbers have grown so large that even the skeptics struggle to explain them away.

In 2024, Chinese inventors and companies filed 1.8 million patent applications, accounting for nearly half of every patent filed anywhere on earth that year, and more than three times the number submitted in the United States, which managed 501,831. To put that gulf in perspective: if you took every patent a...