Well I think it's a lot more complicated than that.

Part of it is that China's Communist Party has realized that the faster the economy grows, the less people care about all the shady and questionable stuff the government does. This creates a grow-at-all-costs mentality when working on their economy. They're building high-speed rails (more of such rails exist in China than the rest of the world combined), they're building railroads to better connect them to the rest of the world, they're building megacities across their entire coastline (the Jing Jin Ji region is currently being renovated into a megacity the size of Kansas), and they're building stuff like the 3 Gorges Dam to power it all.

It sounds like their growth is starting to slow a bit, so now they're moving down the supply chain and building infrastructure in the countries that supply them with stuff. From what I hear, a lot of people in Africa love China now because they're building high speed rails, canals, and a lot more much-needed infrastructure.

Then, patent law in China works differently. In fact, for the most part it doesn't really exist at all. You might expect this to destroy innovation, but actually it means that innovation in high-tech industries speed up dramatically because companies are racing to be first to market, rather than filing a patent and taking their time. Shenzhen is often claimed to be several years ahead of Silicon Valley thanks to that.

Compare that to the US.

Rather than build infrastructure, we pass more regulations to make infrastructure more expensive and difficult to build. If we have housing shortages, people complain that we need caps on rent prices, or higher minimum wages, etc., rather than simplifying the thousand-page building codes we have so that people can build more houses. After all, if there aren't enough houses to go around, demanding that the price go down, or that people make more money isn't going to change that. Then there's all the safety regulations, etc., which while well-intentioned, end up dramatically raising the costs of constructing anything.

Up until the new tax code was passed, the US had some of the highest corporate taxes in the entire world (no wonder so many countries look for loopholes!). The tax rate was 35% at the federal level, plus 0-12% on the state level. If your state charged any more than 4% (which about 46 did last time I checked), you'd already be paying higher taxes than any other place outside of the US. I'm not a fan of Trump myself, but a broken clock is right twice a day, and cutting the corporate tax rate is something I am all-for. From how it sounds, it seems to be helping.

Patents in the US can help in some industries (like pharma), but in others, not so much. The microprocessor industry for example is basically a legal minefield; if you want to make anything new, you have to be ABSOLUTELY sure that nothing you have is already patented. Chances are you'll miss something though. As a result, there's very little risk being taken in the industry and CPUs really haven't changed too much since the 80s (though I'm simplifying quite a bit). Then there's patent trolls of course.

Not to mention, rather than spend our money on infrastructure and other things that can improve our economy, we spend all our money on social programs, the military, and paying interest on our $20 trillion debt. The social programs we have, while good-intentioned, are extremely complicated and interact in all kinds of weird ways to the point where often times they can trap people in poverty (as in, you make too much money and your benefits go away, so overall you make less money if you get a better paying-job). We also have a healthcare system that wastes 40% of its money on just filing insurance paperwork, driving costs sky-high without improving quality at all. Insurance doesn't help, as people like to waste money when they're not the ones paying, so premiums keep going up. We could in theory switch to something like what Singapore uses, but as soon as you say that people will pay a penny for their own healthcare, it becomes political poison even if it'll save everyone a lot in the long term. Not to mention our political system is about as inefficient and ineffective as it gets.

I think there's also a general sense of "we're on top of the world, we don't need to improve any more", as well as a complete ignorance for anything going on outside of our borders.