Utterly untrue. China happened to froze its technological progress almost at the very verge of the Industrial Revolution. For most of its history, up to the late Ming and the Qing, Imperial China was one of the most dynamical civilizations on Earth as it concerned technological progress. Rome itself remained quite dynamic up to the 3rd century crisis.
Unless you speak of the Zuang incident, which launched a thousand WIs, The Ming were not innovative. You see, the problem with the Chinese is that machinery was simply not as profitable for labour as manual labour, and their culture and geographic position was very counter-productive to real technological innovation beyong practical uses(like certain types of rice that could grow at different seasons).