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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...
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!