> When you give China a machine, it's only a matter of time before they reverse engineer it and make something slightly worse but much cheaper

> This kind of theft

You called what they did “reverse engineering.” But then you next called it theft.

Why?

Reverse Engineering is not theft. It’s a follower route, where you build the same thing that someone else had built. You don’t even need their blueprints. You can just work off of their output, and work backwards.

One famous reverse engineering company was Compaq, which reverse engineered the IBM PC, with the nod from Microsoft to make their own PC compatible clone. Was this also theft? And was this also a crime in your worldview?

Another example is the atomic bomb. Once America proved that a nuclear fission bomb was possible, then it was only a matter of time before another country reproduced it.