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> cheaper cost to do r&d.

Is this a euphemism for outright IP theft?

They are ahead of the US when it comes to robot vacuums.

This is a simplistic view of IP theft. The Chinese are much more advanced. Steal from Roomba at the beginning. Surpassed Roomba? Steal something from BMW that's secret Lidar navigation work. Steal something from Samsung for circuit design, steal something from Tesla, steal something from Mobileeye, etc.

I meant cheaper engineers.

Also faster iteration. Back in my mechanical engineering days, we'd design prototypes and then have to wait months for them to come in (of course they were built off-shore).

Doing it onshore was difficult (few could handle our requests, or they were exorbitantly expensive and couldn't scale, and terrible quality control.)

Thus we'd take a long, long time to work out design issues. A Chinese company can iterate much faster because of this.

It wasn't just China. Roomba was really slow to move mapping technology into their lower end products. There was a lot of reputational damage done by making mediocre products their primary volume sellers.

Well it's more about how much does the state invest. That's how innovation exist (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State)