Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why this trope about China ruling the world is crap. Generally speaking they are good at copying, reverse engineering, and cheap labor. The country's MO is to steal designs and process and implement better. When the west finally figures out how to stop letting China steal/copy - then the West will continue innovating, and China won't have anything to make.
Except the same empty arguments were made against Japan, and were levelled against the nations producing the imported cotton cloth that people were starting to buy in preference to long established Lancashire cotton mills. "Don't buy Japanese electronics or motorcycles, they only make poor cheap copies" would be commonly heard in the seventies and early eighties. They easily - and quickly - moved past that phase, as…
One thing left out of this formulation is that it was realized at some point, certainly by the 1970s for electronics, that the Japanese added "and improve", which no one says about the Chinese. Who are said to have a pattern more than a century old of steadily decreasing quality until the customer complains. Different culture, vastly different societal trust levels, Japan high, China low, different results.