At this late date, no one should be surprised by this. China can produce just about anything except an original idea. And maybe they are smarter in that thinking- why reinvent the wheel when they can just steal the idea from someone else whose already done it. Even the kung flu was funded by US research dollars.
It should also be apparent that free trade is never the friend of the people who have the highest standard of living and highest wages because manufactories will source their factory labor elsewhere to avoid paying US wages so that their products are more profitable.
On top of that our government has been importing workers for the jobs that can’t be exported.
That doesn't bode well for U.S. workers, but I'm not sure what the upside is for China.
What you are talking about is wage arbitrage—it happened within the United States when northern manufacturers moved south.
Today the Chinese are themselves getting burned by even lower cost producers in Asia—check out the “made in” info on various products and you can see who those countries are.
My father was invited to review their largest dam project while it was still being poured as part of the professional engineering ASCE Concrete Board. Saw a row of 10 concrete batch mixers: 3 were painted in their original Dutch colors, two working. The third had been stripped down, dis-assembled, and copied. The next 7 concrete plants were in identical Chinese green paint. All running.
A competitor turbine company’s field engineer told me they shipped the complex blade packages for a new power plant turbine (900 Megawatt) to China. But it got hung up” in customs for a three weeks. Was received on site, all the carefully gas-tight shrink-wrapped plastic ripped off and removed from one of every blade set. Wiped off of the preservatives, then put back in the cartons and shipping crates. Obviously removed, cleaned, 3D microscoped and scanned and measured, then re-packages.
They never made another sales again in China. Always got underbid by the local Chinese company for some reason.
Once upon a time we got hemostats from India. The instant you picked them up you could tell they were inferior They were dimensional copies only, the rest was junk.