Even if that were true, you can't justify sins in the present day on such ancient history. Otherwise, the cycle of wars, crimes, and all other manner of social ills would never cease.
What we aspire to have is a market system that's fair. And there's so much knowledge, science, and technology that's freely or readily available to help countries and their people develop. Plus, we can look at numerous other countries who developed the right way, including the very country which now leads the world in producing lithography equipment that was turned into a smoldering heap of rubble by World War II.
For that matter, look how far Japan has come in that time. Are you saying the only way China, a country 10x its size, can become competitive is by underhanded means? How dare you underestimate and undersell the Chinese people!
That's not really what's going on, here.
Competition isn't a problem, as long as it's fair.
"Theft" of knowledge is a far cry from war. Thrt arent comparable at all. We should never excuse war by saying other nations did it in the past. Thankfully war and "theft" of knowledge are very different and one kills a bunch of people and the other allows others to prosper better.
If a nation is able to build themselves into the most powerful nation on earth (USA) through the theft of knowledge from the English than that nation has no place telling others they should play fair. Let's also not forget the USA had a very unfair advantage of having killed off almost all the natives to steal their barely resource extracted land. An advantage no other nation has really had. I'm getting off topic though.
I would also like to point out that every nation and major corporation all participate in corporate espionage. This is caused by competition. Competition does not lead to people acting fairly. For example, look how many athletes take performance enhancing drugs.
You may aspire to have a market system that's fair, but the capitalists do not, and they are the ones that have the most control over our socio-economic system. Competition does not lead to fair play.
Now let's talk about China. They clearly are very innovative with high-speed rail development. No on can claim all they did was steal technology. So you can drop the crap about me underestimating the Chinese people. I don't.
Considering USA has been doing everything it can to stop China from being able to buy the newest lithography tools while also banning the shipment of the most advanced GPU's to China, how can you claim USA is doing all it can to keep China from technologically developing?
USA does this because they do not want a fair market system. They want to be the ones to control it, and they largely do.
Lastly, China is not 10x the size of USA. It's about 4.5 times larger than USA population size but maybe you're talking about Taiwan.