Comment by AlanYx

Chinese phone manufacturers that use Qualcomm hardware generally do respect the royalty system. Though they pay a lower total royalty because of a 2015 antitrust action in China, which forced Qualcomm to calculate royalties on 65% of the net selling price of devices sold for use in China, rather than 100% used in most of the rest of the world. (For those unfamiliar, Qualcomm's royalties are not a flat fee per device/modem, they're calculated as a percentage of the total selling price of the finished device, sometimes with a negotiated cap.)

China is playing the long game here because they expect domestically generated IP revenue to be significant in the future.