Defaulting to China stealing IP is a perfectly reasonable first step.

China is known for their countless theft of Europe and especially American IP, selling it for a quarter of the price, and destroying the original company nearly overnight.

Its so bad even NASA has begun to restrict hiring Chinese nationals (which is more national defense, however illegally killing American companies can be seen as a national defense threat as well)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wd5qpekkvo.amp

https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-chinese-communist-party-us...

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, this is well known knowledge and many hacks in the past decade and a half involved exfiltrating stolen IP from various companies.