According to U.N. Data, China has filed six-times more AI patents than the U.S. (patentlyapple.com)

They also publish way more papers, but I suspect just like with the papers, quantity != quality, the quality of Chinese research is improving though

The US-led imaginary property system was at least administered in mostly good faith, encouraging actual competition amongst the administrative class benefiting from it. And it still produced endless make-litigation garbage like "Method and Apparatus for Banging Two Rocks Together... Near a Computer"

Whereas now this system has expanded to a different center of power with different strategic goals, quite content to operate closer to the barer reality (aka hack). And when a document can create a claim of legal claim of ownership over the ways everyone else can do things, the fundamental incentive is just to generate as many of those documents as possible.