The authors are stretching for confirmation of their thesis. China investing $3 billion per year in buying robots from the Swiss, Germans, Japanese and Americans is not going to have an appreciable relative effect on their economic development. I would be more impressed if they had their own robotics industry, but that takes ingenuity.
China still has zero respect for intellectual property. So, they’re buying robots. They’ll disassemble them, figure out how to make them cheaply and proceed to do so very rapidly. The nations from whom the intellectual property was stolen will block the sale of these robots in their markets, but that doesn’t remove the benefit to China. Goods manufactured via ill-gotten intellectual property will still be sold, and the robots themselves will be sold to nations that do not have legal restrictions due to intellectual property rights.
It’s piracy, what China has been doing for going on thirty years. We’ve been going along with a wink and a nod because there’s a lot of money to be made in labor arbitrage and in markup of cheap imported goods from China. It has to be clamped down upon.
Russia and China have found its much easier to just let the U.S. be the innovator, develop the technology, and spend their money then just send in spies steal it unfortunately. Been that way for a long, long time.