Every bit of available data indicates that the Chinese government would censor you and everyone you know if it had the ability to do so; the ruling party have demonstrated their willingness to violently destroy any person, group, or ideology that they disapprove of. Any other assessment of the situation is, at best, naive to the point of being dangerous. The twentieth century (not to mention the past ten years) has taught us that democracy is a fragile thing; it is extremely important that western citizens be vigilant and open-eyed when assessing who to deal with in educational, political, and business theaters.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...
Basically, the structure and ideology of the regime is assumed to be the authentic expression of something inherent in that particular culture, rather than the product of material circumstances or deliberate choices by a political elite.
In Shenzhen especially, you have to out-compete the others on implementation of ideas instead of rest on your laurels (err, copyrights and patents). Wired has a great documentary of its history and culture here with examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY
One I like that's about improvement more than stealing is the iPhone copy. That company got the copy out about a year before the iPhone hit China. Apple refused to let customers swap their batteries and SIM cards easily. Their I.P. protections let them pull bullshit like that. The Chinese knockoff did let you swap those. The chargers come to mind, too. If your interface is proprietary, a company will likely spring up offering a modified product or cheaper adapter that lets people keep their existing one.
The Chinese education system seems to emphasize that many "Chinese" ideas were stolen by "foreigners"in previous generations. This hardly seems to jibe with the claims of merely cultural understandings of ownership.
Except the communist party which controls all of China, and takes a highly authoritarian stance on the free spread of information they dislike and fear of course. They have a literal and digital Great Wall, I’m not sure how your square this fact with what you’re claiming is a cultural bias to collective information policies.
They don't dislike foreign I.P. that their businesses can use to get rich. They also don't seem to dislike what Shenzhen is doing since they're not throwing the copycats in jail. It looks like the communist party is fine with this concept.
Controlling information they fear to stay in power is a different topic entirely. They're all about that. That's why they have the Wall, censhorship, etc. You also seem to be conflating what Chinese individuals and businesses will do if they aren't restricted vs what their government imposes on them. The culture I'm describing applies to the former. I have no idea how the latter thinks past preserving and expanding their power.
Yeah, it's not the same as open source. They certainly don't give anything out like in open-source. Your comment is misleading, though. The Chinese companies, which include lots of competitors internal to China, just copy everything in their process of iterating products out. So, Chinese companies and/or government takes the I.P., create their own products, and other Chinese copy them. All this stuff keeps spreading cheaper and getting forked kind of like open source. Hits overcharging, proprietary suppliers hard like open source. Just isn't open source with the full benefits.
We can debate all we want but the reality is that China has progressed and its people have benefitted through better living standards. Now those people are investing in other countries creating jobs and improving living standards across poor countries. Weirdly enough one such beneficiary has been India and African countries. Just 5 years ago India could not domestically manufacture cell phones. Now there are over 260 factories with 95% of the phones being produced in the country. This has been a big benefit to India and its people.
Funny how that worked out?
I am not sure what counts as "stealing" in terms of IP. I am a firm believer in protecting IP but at the same time you cannot argue that freely sharing knowledge has its own benefits. IP laws (especially patents) need to be revisited to make sure they serve their purpose and reasonably help inventors benefit from their inventions.
Edit: I must also clarify that this goes both ways. The way Chinese don't end up sharing knowledge is bad. They also do not respect IP law and contracts which needs to drastically change. If they would have respected those and given a fair playing field for foreign companies, I don't think this would be a big issue today.