Almost all of those “gains” came from stolen western IPs and labor exploitation.
Yeah, but that’s capitalism in general, which is what people mean when they say “free market”.
USA’s brand of capitalism has IP protections, such as patent, copyrights, and trademarks. None of which China actually follows.
China is well known to conduct significant corporate espionage. (IE: hackers targeting corporations like Microsoft or Sony, not really people with “critical national secrets” but instead software they’d rather keep secret). China also hacks for national-security purposes too I’m sure.
I mean, still better than the Russian hackers or North Korean ones that focus on randomware. China at least is trying to get economic benefits out of it, but… its clearly built up on a lot of stolen tech.
