It's predicated on the old racist trope that Chinese steal everything and cannot invent anything of their own because both they are asiatic hordes and also communism no iphone. So it holds that if we hadn't invented them, they couldn't have stolen it and raced ahead of our plodding efforts and our existing advantage in ICE would be too great (by decades) for them to overcome from their starting position. Which is of course wrong, laughably so.