China has invested hugely in education and the engineering field, and it's not like they've just been sitting on their hands upto now - of course they do industrial espionage just like everyone else but they also have absolutely huge r&d budgets and an absolutely huge tech sector.

Honestly we should all just cut the tribal politics and work together to create technologies which can help avoid future conflicts -people use to say that middle East would descend into water wars by now but solar powered desalination has totally changed that, if we'd replaced oil already then America wouldn't have needed any of the wars it's been in for the last fifty years...

Rather than every country in the world developing it's own version of everything we should cooperate for a better future.