I did say China seems to do well in those respects.

But it's difficult to leap ahead from step 0 to step 3, as you need the gains from step 0 to achieve step 1, the benefits from step 1 to achieve step 2, etc. Some of those benefits are food, shelter, healthcare, education (hard to have engineers without it, for example), physical infrastructure, finance, honest and skilled government, etc.

On the other hand, catching up is usually much faster than doing something for the first time. China is catching up fast. I think the cheating / dishonesty gives Westerners the wrong idea - Chinese cheating is like doping at the Olympics: if you want to win, you have to be among the best and cheat.

> 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 R&D and just use mature solutions - South Korea and Taiwan, for example.

I also mean stuff like stealthily reducing quality until the customer notices and such things. It seems to be more common in B2B than in B2C.

That's what Americans want to buy: barely functional cruft to sell at Walmart. China also makes plenty of innovative quality products. The US bans those. Cars are one example.

> I also mean stuff like stealthily reducing quality until the customer notices and such things.

You're attributing that to Chinese business? Isn't that what enshittification is, an American capitalist vision?