Japan did this. Do not underestimate China.
Another thing is that Japan is friendly towards us and our values. China seeks to bully and topple every nation that does not bow to it. Not to mention the ongoing genocide and the rise of the superior Han mentality.
There are plenty of countries like India that could do it, but China tops the list not only for stealing from US, but also from every other western country including my own: Canada. See Nortel and how Huawei was created off of stolen tech and research from Nortel and thereby bankrupting Nortel. For the latest trickery, see CanSino covid vaccine.
China and collaboration with China or chinese scientists at this point cannot be trusted at all.
It takes time though, Toyota was founded in 1937, they started by reverse engineering Chrystler cars (they were surprisingly open about this in the Toyota museum). Chinese companies got started maybe around the 1980s with market reforms.
China's game plan has been to encourage companies to use Chinese factories based on artificially low prices (subsidized with massive PRC spending), and then to (usually openly) steal the IP and begin making competing products.
This cycle has already happened to over a dozen former clients. I went in-house years ago, but even before then my firm had begun discouraging companies from opening manufacturing facilities in China for any product with any sort of valuable technical IP.
> China's game plan has been to encourage companies to use Chinese factories based on artificially low prices (subsidized with massive PRC spending), and then to (usually openly) steal the IP and begin making competing products.
"working for" then "starting their own" yeah. See, you get it.
Your analogy gets even better, just not in ways you expected, in that people who go work at Michelin starred restaurants in the kitchen do so for low-to-zero wages because the real benefit is the experience they're gaining initially.