They're trying to rehabilitate their image as an outlaw nation on the issue of intellectual properties. What they're doing is known as "patent breaking." Thomas Edison was a very prolific patent breaker. He carefully examined a competitor's patent application, helpfully published by the patent office years before the patent was granted, and developed a way to "work around" the patent with a similar device that would not infringe his competitor's patent. The Chinese are doing this.
I saw no evidence of it when we went to China for Nortel. They confiscated our RF test gear and we sat in a hotel room for almost three weeks waiting to get it back. They could have just as easily bought it on the open market and copied it. It was commonly available test gear, nothing secret. When we did get it back it was obvious it had been disassembled, inspected and reassembled, only nothing worked. Kinda reminds me of that Chinese crescent wrench I threw into some bushes on a site in Kentucky after it jammed at a most inopportune moment. It did look like a crescent wrench, though.....