Your story is not the first I’ve heard about the Chinese trying to reverse engineer everything they can get their hands on.
I also laughed about the wrench story. The thing is just like the Japanese tools were once crap the Chinese ones are becoming better and better. Especially since the west insists on giving them fully working factories to reverse engineer!
The biggest victim in this regard was not a Western company but Toyota of Japan. They had a contract with the Chinese to build parts for new Toyotas. Unfortunately for Toyota, whoever drafted the contract failed to put in a clause about what would happen to the factory equipment and tooling upon termination of the contract. As you might have expected, the Chinese violated the agreement and then Toyota terminated the contract. But that meant they had just given a fully operational factory with quality Japanese tooling to the Chinese.