The Japanese from the Meiji Restoration onward have literally had explicit policies for sending people abroad - students, academics, military officers - in order to find out how things are done in other countries and imitate them. After WWII, it shifted from military to commercial emphasis, run by an actual Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI), which had close connections to industrial conglomerates. China has also done this, in the post WWII period starting with the Soviet Union, but that ended when they fell out. Since the 1980s, they've been sending students and academics abroad, and really pushing hard university exchanges, even funding some institutes in the West, so they can send their people to them to work with western academics. It is an explicit technology and expertise copying strategy, and doing it in ways assuring feedback between foreign contacts, local research and company product development in the Japanese case. In China's case, there's also been a lot of emphasis on cutting edge research.
This is not necessarily anything really shady. While there can be industrial espionage as part of it - mostly its just buying tech, learning by working with those on the cutting edge, and paying to have students enrolled in foreign universities. It is different from what goes on in less organized countries, in that they really try to make sure the tech is useful and that it gets used.
Japan doesn't really do copying as such any more, since they're now one of the most advanced countries, and China is also starting to get to where it is no longer useful This is a big crisis for many western universities who've been milking that tuition cow, as Chinese students more and more decide to go to university in China.