I recall reading 10+ years ago that Chinese economists were calling for stronger IP laws in China to accelerate their technical progress. Maybe the government listened.
This matches the economic literature [1] about the historical development of other industrialized nations as well, including the US. The theory is: when a country is starting to industrialize, they prefer weak IP rights to reduce friction in copying and learning rapidly ("knowledge diffusion".) However, when their industries mature, develop a strong technical base, and start competing by pushing the state of the art through their own inventions, they tend to prefer strong IP rights to protect their investments in R&D.
The Chinese market is notorious for not respecting patents, though, so clearly that isn't working.