But it's difficult to leap ahead from step 0 to step 3, as you need the gains from step 0 to achieve step 1, the benefits from step 1 to achieve step 2, etc. Some of those benefits are food, shelter, healthcare, education (hard to have engineers without it, for example), physical infrastructure, finance, honest and skilled government, etc.
Yes, absolutely. You can see many places have followed that path; you can skip the economic policy and technological R&D and just use mature solutions - South Korea and Taiwan, for example.
The 'cheating' - I assume you mean about IP - is nonsense to me. Who made the rules? The people who want to preserve their IP, and they would make different rules if they didn't have IP themselves. China didn't make those rules.
You're attributing that to Chinese business? Isn't that what enshittification is, an American capitalist vision?