At the end of the day, a single individual can educate many thousands of people or produce high quality research that will advance the country. There's a pretty famous case of this Qian Xuesen who is the father of Chinese space program. He got his education in US, and then left to China during the red scare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen
Many thousands of people like him are doing the same today.
And finally, researches are leaving Europe for China nowadays as well https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-07-19/china-...
However, all that aside, the most important point is that China has a very good education system that's accessible to everyone, and they have a large population. This is coupled with government having a lot of direction over the industry and actively funding the types of research and technology development that's strategic for China. This is a recipe for success.
Quality of life is important and being monitored 24/7 is not my idea of a good life.
Obviously this is anecdotal so take from that what you will. The computer graphics and machine learning communities in academia and industry are small (even with the ML/AI explosion), if this was happening in any significant amount it would be difficult to miss it.
As for research output, I think there are definitely more top-tier papers from Chinese universities than in the past. It still seems like there are more Chinese surnames from Europe and NORAM universities than from Chinese ones. The big names in the field are still in European and NORAM universities.
I wonder how these are articles you linked are counting numbers. It's hard to understand how something like this could be happening completely under the radar.