US had a head start on development, which means these two factions didn't have a level playing ground to compete for a piece of the pie. Therefore China must protect to get back on level playing ground.
It worked for their manufacturing ecosystem, maybe it'll work for tech too.
One of the reasons that should hit home to the HN crowd is that Huawei simply up and 100% cloned some of the highest-end Cisco routers in their early days.
While I'm no fan of patents, when you clone something down to the bugs (which is how Cisco demonstrated the cloning) you deserve to get some penalty.
Also, it appropriated so much of Cisco's IP (quite poorly), at least as it was establishing itself as a network equipment vendor, that I wouldn't call Huawei innovative, not back then.
It was a pretty clear case of cloning very expensive tech for a dime with MASSIVE government support.
I see your point of huawei cloning cisco's IP back when it first started. But today it's the biggest applicant for IP globally.