As millions of Chinese flooded Sina Weibo, a popular micro blogging site in China, over the past two days to express their condolences about the death of Steve Jobs, they raised the question: Why isn't there a Steve Jobs in China, according to an article on the website of The Wall Street Journal on Oct 7, 2011.

The commemoration of Jobs's genius has prompted many Chinese people to ponder why Chinese companies are better at knocking off the originals than coming up with innovative ideas, says the article.

Chinese companies themselves will perform as well as Apple, but their products won't match up, Kaifu Lee, former head of Google China, told his 8 million followers on Weibo. "Chinese companies can be expected to have the market valuation and business model like Apple's within a decade, but it will be difficult to expect any type of Apple-like innovation," he wrote.

Chinese schools that focus too much on memorization and don't encourage critical thinking are partly to blame, Lee was quoted as saying, "It's not that Chinese are not smart or don't have the potential (to become Steve Jobs). Look at Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Steve Chen of YouTube," referring to the two Internet entrepreneurs who were both born in Taiwan and immigrated to the US at young ages.

Chen Zhiwu, a finance professor at Yale University, tweeted that in Chinese schools, "the first thing the teachers do is to rub down the edges of those students who are different from the crowd."