I don’t think we should discount their engineering much. Sure, in recent history it’s been copy paste with possible small improvements, but they’ve been the leaders in supercomputing for a few years now, if memory serves me correctly. As an analogy: Nikon and Canon both started off as companies making cheap copies of german camera models. Within 30 years, they were the innovators and undisputed leaders in that area. On China is a great read: they’re playing a long game, for sure
It doesn’t take a full war to shift the world order, either.