Exactly.
Maybe a lot of our weapons platforms are not the best in the world, but the important thing is that they are OURS.
Every time we build something or spend money on something, it strengthens our own economy, and strengthens our own indigenous defence industries. And it allows us to produce unlimited amounts of our own weapons platforms during wartime.
If we kept sending our own money to other countries, to improve their economy, and improve their indigenous defence industries, how would our own domestic industries ever improve?
You have to eat some bitterness in order to get ahead. And it's paying off, now we are making platforms like the DF-21D, the first and only ASBM platform in the world, and our own 5th generation fighter jets.
This also applies to commercial companies. Lenovo for example, if no one in the domestic Chinese market was willing to give them a chance, and they all prefered to buy foreign computers/laptops instead, then it would have never become the powerful company that it is today.