A patent grants protection of an invention. The watch movement (as a whole) may have been patented centuries ago. Patents expire after, I think, 25 years and obviously today anybody is free to make watch movements without infringing any intellectual property.
A second aspect is the design. how to arrange gears, levers, plates, etc. to make a movement. That is not considered invention and is not patentable.
In today's movements there could be small details that can be considered invention and patentable but they don't cover the whole movement, for example US8348497B2 (Flat balance spring for horological balance...) is a Rolex Patent from 2010. It is still legal to copy a movement without implementing that specific solution but another.
That 'China doesn't care about foreign patents' is incorrect and relative. Incorrect because patents not issued in China don't prevent from producing there. It prevents from exporting but being the internal Chinese market so big, the fact is that Rolex issues their patents also in China (the above example is European Patent, US, China and Japan).
So the correct wording is 'China doesn't care about patents'. Well, they do. There is a line between doing legal and illegal things and they know at which side they stand. Some Chinese business owners fear raids and investigations every day, others don't. What happens is that the Chinese government won't stop them making money from the West, only the Western pressure does that. If that's what 'China don't care about patents' means, then I agree.
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