The "the Chinese can only copy us" thing is quite common in some circles, just as the "all the Japanese can do is copy us" was 50-odd years ago. China overtook the west in a lot of areas 10-20 years ago, to see an example of this travel to any city in China. It's like travelling into the future, we're a decade or more behind them at this stage.
> The "the Chinese can only copy us" thing is quite common in some circles,
Because they do. It's a well known fact that they outright copy western designs and sell them at significantly cheaper prices. The ~$100 Diesel fuel heaters on Vevor and elsewhere are 1:1 copies of German Westabo heaters that retail for upward of $3500 USD. The story of the Cherry QQ which was a 1:1 copy of the Chevy Spark. The list goes on. But please, keep pretending they didn't just copy everyone else while many of their engineers went to western universities and bought home that knowledge.
The scare quotes the earlier comment put around "learned" are unwarranted, but "they copied us instead of bootstrapping" and "they can only copy us" are very different statements.
