> catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time

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.