That's rich, coming from a country that built its econonmy on stolen American and European IP.

IP is supposed to protect innovation, yet china is not just building our own innovations, but exceeding them.

In China there are places you can go and get almost any electronic device, tool, component, or equipment you can dream of immediately within a 15 minute walk.

Is IP law protecting innovations enough to make companies choose to spend money innovating rather than on stock buybacks or is IP law protecting big businesses from new competitors and hampering new businesses by forcing them to hire lawyers to protect them from IP predators?

To have process innovations you must be performing the process in order to understand how to make it better, and through lack of IP law, more people are able to innovate on process in china leading to the worlds premier place to manufacture with scaled functioning supply chains and extremely high supply of people with expertise. IP restricts the number of individuals who are able to perform the same function on a theoretically innovative process, reducing overall supply of expertise.

IP laws exist to protect the small from the big, but because the big are able to coerce the government, governments work on their behalf defeating the goal the law was implemented to achieve.

Which will be more innovative in the long run, the American model of protecting IP requiring a large up front legal burden, or the Chinese model of no IP protections, but large investments in anyone who claims they might innovate removing the burdens that prevent someone from getting to market?

The analysis of either system is orthogonal to what actually matters, whether makers are beaten through competition or domination. For all the worship of the "free market" in the US, china is structurally competitive while America is structurally anti-competitive.

Ever heard of a guy named "Samuel Slater"?

Yes, because he's one of a handful of examples that get trotted out every time this topic comes up. The scale of China's theft is simply incomparable.

America stole British IP in the 19th century. Get over it.

And yet, still preferable to a country that is completely unpredictable and dependent on the ego of a narcissistic fascist-wannabe.

It's wrong to call him a wannabe. He is very smart and very skilled, no joke. He is enacting a fascist revolution against the constitution in America successfully and barely resisted. While he took his foot off the pedal in order to prevent a confrontation, he is still replacing US marshals, generals, and other people in positions of enforcement to ensure he will win future confrontations.

Eh, I see this claim that he's smart and or competent.

I think he just doesn't care for norms which gives him a much easier time in operating the mechanisms of power. That doesn't make him smart or skilled. Previous folks did it with a great deal more skill, leaving far fewer impressions that they were criminals. Half the country seems to have forgotten how easily they supported the illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan- that was skill and smarts to make folks believe those were okay actions. As much as I hate him, Papa Bush would have used the CIA to murder this fool and everyone would have cheered.

Any idiot can extract gallstones if they don't care about killing the patient.