Are you suggesting that Nortel wasn't hacked by the Chinese?
The article makes a much stronger argument that effective Chinese government support of Huawei and the failure of the Canadian government to support Nortel, as well as Huawei's ability to hire away many of Nortel's top researchers, led to their success.
(The journalist's own summary of her article: "It turns out Canada really blew it." https://twitter.com/natalieobiko/status/1278366529591980032)
Is "China bad" how HN and the US is going to look for the next 20 years as North America goes down the hill?
For an actual science based look at Nortel there was a good study done by a team at the Tefler School of Business years ago.[1] Taking an extensive look at the corporate culture and the state of the business which was despite dotcom evaluations in a pretty sorry state already. Tracing the decay back to the 80s and 90s and a whole row of disastrous decisions.
[1](https://obj.ca/article/nortels-failure-was-years-making-telf...)
As a US citizen, reading HN for a year has downgraded me from being extremely patriotic, to considering my options if I get expelled from the country in the next 20 years on the basis of my ethnicity. These folks would cheer that on, and they're my neighbors.
You know the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions. If you cut someone off while driving, it's just a simple error and no biggie, you just misjudged the road situation momentarily; but if someone cuts you off, they are a idiot who should not be on the road and deserves to get their license taken away and their car impounded.
The reaction to anything China on HN is like the above, applied at a national scale.
People also judge others by past behaviors.
Wrong or right, many Americans see China as an enemy. News is filtered through that light. And some news, like convictions about IP theft by Chinese (Xu at IBM, 3 individuals at Sinovel, etc, etc, etc), leave little room for debate. These stories color the ones which may or may not be nefarious like TikTok. Guilt by association.
But they are very selective in doing that. Even when the same actions are done in the same context they will use different measures for different people based on their sentiment toward them. And that just adds to the bias and fuels the cycle. As explained by this simple but accurate picture [0]. They see China and and their hackers as enemies. Do you think they see the NSA and by extension their own country as an enemy? Discarding (unwittingly) half of the context makes it a lot easier to assume they have the moral high ground.
Propaganda doesn't mean it's a lie, just that you take the same truth and shape it into an opinion for the people, depending on what you want to achieve. And it's a tool used by every superpower.