That was absolutely the case until very recently. Qualcomm bought Nuvia, a start-up that was stacked with former Apple engineers, a few years ago. These processors are just now coming to market. Laptops with these processors are benchmarking around MacBook levels (slightly behind single core, slightly ahead in multi core).
Arguably, the PRC is juggling both. I don’t claim to be an expert, but there are certain capitalist undercurrents going on in the private sector along with some level of CCP tension.