Westerners seem to get majorly hung up on the "China copying" meme and miss the bigger picture--China is incredibly focused on technology and there are huge sums of money and a strong cultural impetus for home-grown innovation. As an analogy, China is at the stage where they have learned the major rules for a programming language, and are now copying and pasting advanced code from stackexchange or other places.

Let's not forget historical context either: Japan and S.Korea were once known as knockoff central, and now produce extremely advanced products in their own right.