* Subsidized by the Chinese govt. and intellectual property stolen from western companies.
If, however, A's criticism of B is not an attempt to "make the world a better place" but to prove one's own relative moral superiority, then not only is it highly pertinent to point out A's own moral failings, but also there need be nothing relativistic about it, since ex hypothesi the conversation no longer concerns the morality of this or that action but only whether one party has a legitimate claim to feel superior to the other.
It's not always easy to tell whether one is in the one or the other situation.
GP is correct - any older Cisco employee can count off a laundry list of things Huawei directly stole from them, and the Chinese state absolutely subsidizes them. GP is making the point that it isn't fair to compare Huawei prices to Apple prices given the amount of engineering Huawei stole from other companies and their government subsidies.
China also has lower labor costs generally. Lots of things cost less in other countries for the same reason.
It's rare for anyone to come up with something genuinely original. We depend on education and culture and many things to develop anything. Then we argue about things like intellectual property rights because such conventions are an attempt to sort out how to make society work given that ideas are easily "stolen" and if we don't allow for some means for originators of new things to profit, we actively discourage our best and brightest from contributing to forward progress.
But this forum skews American. Most people will argue "for" the American side and "against" the Chinese for that reason alone.
I'm only pointing out the hypocrisy and silliness of arguing this as if America has some absolute moral high ground.
I follow Natives on Twitter because, according to oral family tradition, I'm a small part Cherokee. I'm pretty sure most full-blooded Natives would happily ship me back to Europe along with the rest of the whites.
I don't know the right answer going forward. I just believe that you need actual facts to find it.
The implicit assumption that China is The Bad Guy and America is The Good Guy is unlikely to yield a real solution when there is so much low hanging fruit for saying "The two nations aren't all that different."
But it seems my thoughts are likely wholly unwelcome here, as is so often the case.
I wonder how those Natives you know on twitter would carve up the land once they got it back - do Apaches need to go back to Canada, since they invaded the southwest only in the ~16th century and pushed out the Pueblo people?