Hot take: Even if they did steal tech from US companies, who cares? I don't just say that about China supposedly stealing from the US, I think corporate espionage in general is by no means unethical, for either side and any other party. I'm against patents and trade secret legislation as a whole, and even most of the noncommunists on Lemmy claim to also be against them, so I ask you what makes this different? When we get corporate infighting like this, the consumer (AKA, us) wins as more competitive, improved, and better tailored options pop up especially for niches that the original did not serve very well. For the vast majority of human history, "stealing" of technology and unrelated parties taking and modifying it was not just common, it was inevetable. If you invent something, start selling it, and someone else decided to imitate it and also start selling it, up until just a few generations ago that was seen as a normal part of the development process and no one would have batted an eye, and it led to improvements in the technology, including some of the most important inventions from the pre-capitalist age. The phenomenon of corporations withholding technology for profit with the backing of the law is an extremely recent thing, and why should we be defending it in any form again?

The USSR achieved virtually every space race first except landing a man on the moon. And that was after ~30 years that included two world wars, a civil war + invasion by the premier world powers of the day, and a starting point of a largely pre-industrial backwater.

Socialist ingenuity will weather any isolation

Which is hilarious because the capitalists always argue that innovations requires capitalism. They particularly like to point at smartphones, yet cell phones themselves were created in the USSR. Space race? USSR by almost every meaningful metric. The obvious ones people know about, but the USSR are STILL the only country to ever land on Venus.

A few others include:

Medical innovations: The world's first artifical heart, the world's first lung transplant, the world's first liver transplant, cadaveric blood transfusions. All USSR.

Pressure suits and underwater welding? USSR.
Electronic Cigarettes (some people argue the benefits but this is the only thing that helped me quit smoking). China.

Synthetic bovine insulin? China.

Meningitis B Vaccine? Cuba.

Freaking lung cancer vaccine (still in testing admittedly). Cuba.

Capitalists shut down innovation unless they can profit from it. I would argue most of our greatest achievements have been thanks to socialism.