China’s education system also suppresses innovation while rewarding imitation. Although some Chinese schools conduct innovative experimental education, they remain few and have little impact.From childhood to adulthood, Chinese students are subjected to rote learning—memorizing and obeying rather than questioning or thinking independently. Thus, while Chinese students and researchers excel at replication and refinement of existing work, they are poor at true creativity.
This could be a scale problem. Memorization doesn’t ask much from the teachers; you could probably have non-experts deliver adequate results. It’s hard to find and train a lot of teachers skilled enough to lead more open-ended stufy.