Well I was in the mining industry, in a service capacity. The company sold equipment to China mining companies to actually do this stuff, and included analysing and improving mining and mining refinement processes. It didn’t matter the mineral/element they were targeting, we had equipment to make it happen.
The tech was never theirs, in a mining (start to finish) capacity. It was already western, they bought it. And like all good chinese companies, they then copied it and made half arsed versions of it. They even had the audacity to buy our parts that were proprietary, that they simply could not make immediately (I assume they worked it out eventually).
Interestingly, Gallium and Germanium were used in our old technologies that we sold to them. Our new tech doesn’t need either of those. So any Rare Earth processing they have was derived from what the west had already achieved.
Unfortunately its the access to the actual mined elements that we want to consume that is the problem, its not the tech they stole from us in the first place.
I don’t know anything about their Covid-19 gene editing splice kits, but I wouldn’t trust their LIDAR. Probably burn you (or the pedestrian in front of you) retinas out!