Yes, well, in a way they're right and I suspect everyone here knows it no matter how and mighty they might want act when commenting. When foreign (here 'Chinese') competition just ignores copyright laws while 'western' companies have to abide by them for every piece of data they use to train their models the former will have a clear advantage over the latter. This also happens to be how the USA acted in the 1800s [1]:

the United States declined an invitation to a pivotal conference in Berne in 1883, and did not sign the 1886 agreement of the Berne Convention which accorded national treatment to copyright holders. Moreover, until 1891 American statutes explicitly denied copyrights to citizens of other countries and the United States was notorious in the international sphere as a significant contributor to the "piracy" of foreign literary products. It has been claimed that American companies for the most part "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement" (Feather, 1994, 154). The tendency to freely reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent (see Dozer, 1949).

[1] http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_artte...