Officer of China’s People’s Liberation Army Arrested at LAX

And then he told them everything during an interview. Or maybe it's all lies to hide something else. Who knows.

And wiping your phone before international travel, particular to China, is just smart. That doesn't imply wrongdoing.

This is super common with industrial espionage. As a reductio ad absurdum after 1991 I believe the Russians sold working fighter jets with detailed blue prints and instructions on how to manufacture all the components to the Converse Chinese. They still failed to make a perfect copy. Same deal for whatever the Soviet copy of the B-52 was. Building a sophisticated piece of machinery when your supply chain is very different you have to make compromises and different choices and they all add up.

There was industrial espionage too. Considering they had the former and political backing, it's surprising how much of a disaster the 144 was - Not least because it was built for a market that didn't exist (comrade) in the Soviet Union, it was a noisy deathtrap. Their western equivalents flew somewhere on the order of a thousand times further (Concordski only did about 100 commercial flights)

It just occurred to me to check out the Mig-29 on Wikipedia, and it has an uncanny resemblance to the F-15.

The real issue at hand is that he is suspected of something worse than merely copying a lab layout. Is a laboratory setup even protected? In many cases an experiment will elude replication because the lab setup was not properly documented.

There is no scenario where that outcome happens. It's so absurd as to barely warrant a retort. Your premise requires that China enslave the entire planet, literally. China has to physically occupy - whether directly in-border or near-shore - and dictate all choices of every ally of the US, including all NATO members, as well as all of Asia.

You missed a lot of other advantages the US has over China.

4) A demographic advantage, which is a separate advantage from just not being an ethnostate. China's demographics are rapidly collapsing. There has never been a rising superpower that maintains its upward trajectory with a failing demographics, that will hold true as it pertains to China as well. Cheap, high volume labor is their largest single advantage, and they're losing those workers at an accelerating rate.

5) The US has fewer people and a system already transitioned to a high income low labor volume approach, which is a massive advantage in the era of automation and artificial intelligence. China has to go through that transition yet and it's going to be brutal for them. China has a population the size of the US living on $3 per day; one of the poorest large segments of population on the planet. Those people will never climb the prosperity ladder because it's impossible, and that dire context is only going to get worse as China's formerly easy growth slows perpetually going forward. China has already gotten old before they got rich at the median, it's too late.

6) An immigration advantage, which is slightly different from (although it relates to) the ethnostate reference. China will never convince the Elon Musks of the world to move to China.

7) Freedom of expression and speech, which is a massive cultural benefit globally (including when it comes to propaganda). It's why the US is the only country in world history to acquire a position of global cultural hegemony, spanning music, TV, movies and cultural projection broadly. No other nation has come even remotely close. As is, China can never possess this advantage.

8) China's system requires that they install a global dictatorship, or it has to collapse back in on itself. Their system is too fragile, too easily broken. You can see that in their emotionalism and fear about Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, any tiny protest or movement, any challenge to the party dictatorship, and how you can't discuss any of their numerous atrocities like Mao's famines or Tiananmen (ie you can never actually discuss their history). They have to expand their system of censorship globally (which is what they're trying to do right now, with Wolf Warrior diplomacy, trying to browbeat and threaten everyone into submission). In the US, you can freely discuss all of the mistakes the US has made, and everyone constantly does; we're jabbed globally 24/7 and we absorb that as part of being a superpower; that openness to criticism generates real long-term stability (not fake perceived stability, a managed image that isn't real).

9) English as the globally dominant language. The world will never adopt Mandarin widely.

10) The US is a liberal, democratic nation with a huge number of powerful global allies that are also part of the liberal order (from France to South Korea). China has no allies, only frenemies like Russia and North Korea. All the countries near China are terrified of them and will naturally ally with the US accordingly, including Vietnam. Countries like Japan and South Korea will never be allies with China, they're permanent rivals.

11) Open societies are always vastly superior to insular, closed-off societies. That includes when it comes to attracting immigration, getting the maximum out of their own people, or producing cultural output to project into the world. In the US, a Muslim genius from Xinjiang is free to become the next Jensen Huang; in China, they're in a re-education camp being tortured and denied all human rights. In the US, you can freely mock our leaders if they do stupid things (as an example) - on TV, in movies, and so on, a critical cultural element that China entirely lacks and it makes their system weak, fragile (see: Alec Baldwin v Trump, or Will Ferrell v Bush; those people would be in prison for doing that in China; the US has a long, glorious history of taking its elites to the mat, going back before Mark Twain). Being able to freely make fun of the elites, is a critical necessity to a stable system over time; in China, joke apps are illegal.

12) China has an aggressive caste system that de facto wholly revokes all rights of minority groups such as gay persons (and also including many other groups). The US welcomes and celebrates openly the vast success of a Tim Cook or David Geffen or Ellen Degeneres or Peter Thiel, China doesn't; instead, China violently opppresses all gay people (going so far as to torture them, literally, in an attempt to convert them from being gay).

13) The US has the global reserve currency and it shows no signs of being under threat of being replaced. The Yuan has basically a zero global share of the currency market outside of their borders. The reason for that is because nobody trusts China. That isn't going to change anytime soon.

14) The people of the US have the ability to openly interact with the rest of the world, which is an extraordinary advantage in all regards. The people of China have no ability to freely interact with the rest of the world's citizens, a detriment in so many ways it would take me hours here to discuss it all.

15) Dictatorships always get worse with time, as the dictators seek to retain power against all the forces that inevitably naturally want to rebel against that. Long-serving dictators essentially never liberalize a society. Xi will further crush the people of China under his lust for power, as all dictatorships do as the years go on (and he has already done plenty of that, so it'll get that much worse yet). China's political trajectory is terrifying for the people of China, given the near total revocation of all practiced human rights we've seen there in just the past decade.

16) Command economies don't function well over time. China's fast growth had been quasi masking their vast inefficiencies and economic flaws. You can see those mistakes and problems showing up in their extreme, and rapidly growing debt levels (specifically in their economy), as they require enormous constant additional debt to fake growth; in the span of just ~20 years they became the most indebted nation in history. The market economy system always proves vastly superior, you can see this all over the globe. The most successful economies are market based economies, including: the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Britain, Finland, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Israel and so on. All the highest GDP per capita nations are market based economies (with the sole couple exceptions being small energy states like Qatar), not command economies like China. China's one great trick was the combination of mercantilism and vast cheap labor. That trick has been exhausted, going forward their situation will get far more difficult as the easy slack in their economy is gone.

There are a lot more I can list.

This is the thing that annoys me, many Americans approve their government doing industrial espionage to other countries, but then are morally outraged when others do it.

Ultimately, there is no real morality when it comes to the actions of state actors beyond "will it improve my citizen's life?". This most certainly will, so for a Chinese official it seems moral to them.

no democracy can exist without first spilling blood for it imho.

'According to court documents, Wang was still employed by the PLA while he was studying in the United States and he made false statements about his military service in his visa application in order to increase the likelihood that he would receive his J1 visa.'

The allegation is that he would not have been on a scientific exchange program had it been clear that it was a scientific exchange with the PLA.

I would also guess the US government was monitoring all this guy's communications so they are fully aware of when he was up to.

Unlike most criminals, spies are probably moderately rational about risk/reward, as such this is probably actually an effective deterrent.

/end unsupported opinion.

Also, think Capone and tax evasion.

The law isn't really about people that made a mistake on a visa, the law is about people having ill intentions towards the US.

Is this difference really so significant?