[ethbr1]

You're missing a few components here: time and originator investment.

No advantage, resources aside, is permanently durable. Most are instead temporary advantages -- advantages when you have a technology but your peers do not. IP enforcement is one tool to maintain that window of advantage.

China, like US before it, grew at maximum speed when it was reverse engineering already discovered technologies and applying them.

Like the US, it has already begun to pivot towards IP-enforcement, as it begins to originate novel technologies. To do otherwise is to pretend that copying competitors' discoveries and making them yourself cost the same -- and it very much doesn't.