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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

It’s very different than Japan. Japan is more like the US, capitalist where some companies are cozy with the government.

China is a communist state, where the state or affiliated entity is an owner or partner in significant enterprises. Many industrial commodities have national security interests.

Chinese intelligence entities have embedded engineers in a variety of sectors… a few years ago a guy got caught embedding turbine designs inside of nature photos from GE Vernova. Another recently got caught exfiltrating aviation trade secrets, including turbofan designs.

This type of intelligence and technology transfer is no doubt helpful to Comac, the PLA controlled aircraft manufacturer.

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> This is completely irrelevant, as there's no evidence that the US uses its state intelligence apparatus to engage in industrial espionage

Apart from recent and historical evidence to the contrary[0;1], one has to expect that every member of the G20 group is doing the same against everyone else - and has also been doing so for decades. Perhaps more importantly, you have to assume that every intelligence agency in that same group are constantly (re)compromising and extending their foothold in their peers' communications systems as much as they can.

From a national security perspective, to refrain from doing so would be irresponsible. That said...

> There's ample evidence that the PRC does this, and has been doing this, for decades

This is also true. The approach taken by China was brutally effective: in order to allow foreign investment into China, the investor company had to accept terms that started with Technology Transfer programs.[2;3] For a Western company, ongoing access to relatively cheap and educated labour, in addition to a market of a billion+ potential customers, the short term tradeoffs were each seen individually profitable enough to compromise on their longer term sustainability. After all, it made the graphs go up.

The technologies that the companies chose to keep out of China were then the juicier, self-selected targets for pure industrial espionage.

The way I see it, we're slightly more than a decade away from reintroduction of internment camps. One of the G20 players is going to overstep the invisible boundaries, in a game where the rules are constantly rewritten. The result will be an inevitable knee-jerk reaction, propped up by the already visibly rising nationalistic and xenophobic fervour.

We are entering the age of the next round of the Great Game, this one fit for the 21s century, for the control of all six continents.[4]

0: https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m...

1: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlant...

2: https://www.uscc.gov/research/how-chinese-companies-facilita...

3: https://www.csis.org/analysis/rethinking-technology-transfer...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game

Your first citation [0] does not actually provide evidence for the claim that the US government is engaging in IP theft and passing that IP to US companies - spying on a defense minister (even though it's something that shouldn't happen given that the US and France are allies) is categorically different, and is something that you would expect countries to do (even if be disappointed at them) for defense and strategic purposes only, without any IP theft. You'd need additional evidence to indicate IP theft.

Your second citation [1] links to no sources and makes the massive error that the NSA is a department of the CIA. I don't think that it's trustworthy, although I can look up the story later and if I find other sources we can see if it's plausible.

> Perhaps more importantly, you have to assume that every intelligence agency in that same group are constantly (re)compromising and extending their foothold in their peers' communications systems as much as they can.

Yes, I think this is a reasonable assumption - I'm not saying that it's right, but it's reasonable. However, that's still categorically different from the IP theft being discussed, in the context of being able to trust your knowledge workforce and having good cyber security.

Thanks for the analogy to the Great Game, this is interesting!

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