I don’t think Bungie was making an assessment of the Chinese or anyone else with this detail, but in the Halo series the leader race of the alien religious collective called The Covenant initially achieved their power by reverse engineering and then utilizing the technology of an ancient galaxy conquering civilization. The human species, which based on the time period likely is very analogous to the US military, found that to be a big weakness because once they acquired some of the tech they were able to use it to improve on their own tools and weapons, but the Covenant never did because the ancient aliens were viewed as gods by them.
Not sure if i had a point but I thought it was a fun connection