Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the sorry technological state of mobile payments, such as their reliance on QR to authenticate, it’s more likely that quick adoption resulted from having no legacy POS solution and not superior innovation. Unclear how QR has meaningfully less friction than NFC solutions.
QR is fast, reliable and incredibly cheap to implement. It scans at a distance, with no significant chance of unintended transactions or MITM attacks. If I'm a roadside snack vendor and want to accept mobile payments, I don't need to buy some sort of NFC widget, I just need to print out a QR code and stick it on my cart. I can send 100rmb to a friend in a couple of seconds, without worrying whether their phone is NFC…
I have worked with anti-fraud teams at Alibaba and other unnamed large Chinese firms. This is extremely far from the truth, and shoulder surfing QR scanning scams have been in the national news in China many times. NFC tags are cheap and already being proposed for scooters, etc.
QR proliferation is again enabled mostly by the fact that there is no incumbency advantage, not because they're better innovations. Even you admit they aren't, and you don't seem to fully understand how bad QR is as a payment media. Imagine Square's uptake in American SMBs and then mentally map that almost every Chinese retailer is or recently was an SMB. That's simply what's happening.
I don't harbor the notion that the US is particularly advanced, especially in standardized infrastructure, but pointing to QR as an example of Chinese innovation is not convincing.