Airbus manufactures in China. They have a large factory in Tianjin [1].
China is on course to have its own commercial airliner soon [2]
[1] https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2018/09/airbus--chin...
China is on course to have its own commercial airliner soon [2]
[1] https://www.airbus.com/newsroom/news/en/2018/09/airbus--chin...
I add (first) because I've read about the C919 elsewhere.
The subcontractor did this entirely willingly and I don't blame them, given that Airbus treated them like sh*. Sure they were not the absolute cutting edge business, but they do a solid job and have a strong engineering background (from the times of MBB, DASA & Co. - their IT in the eng department was horrible). And yet when negotiating a contract for a new test (volume of the contract similar to price of the very specialized equipment necessary), Airbus haggled and put taking it inhouse on the table (they could certainly do that, but as the history of german industry shows, this is just an intimidation tactic for mooore profit).
So the management started to sell to COMAC (basically acting as an intermediary for another not as well-connected german supplier, which also likes to sell to China but can't get around export regulations...), which is basically a sell out, but apparently we want it that way given the protection politics give those predatory bit companies around here (never hear anyone calling Airbus for fair treatment of their supply chain)
... and that's just airline related tech stuff I have passively become aware of within 50km of my office in the last 12 months.
Let's be honest here. Everyone has an incentive to gain insight into what everyone else is doing.
Everyone is spying on everyone else.
I don't know a company that doesn't. How far would they go? That depends. Sometimes governments help...
Lots of companies don't pay attention to their competitors aside from just passing glances. Sometimes your competitions action is not in any way visible to you, for instance when trying to win top secret gov design contracts. When you are on the bleeding edge or the only one working on something, there is just no need. I could come up with a lot of reasons why spying is useless(not saying it doesn't have a use, just not useful in every case as you propose)... but i guess i am confident in things, rather than paranoid. Worrying about what someone else is doing is just wasting time, unless they are coming for you.
There is never a single company working on the bleeding edge. Those who are take a lot of precautions to keep their secrets and are keen to learn their competitors' secrets.
If you work on the cutting edge in tech just send your CV to your company's main competitor. They'll be quick to invite you for interview... To buy your competitor's product to take it apart and study it is also a time-honoured classic. These are just basic examples.