What many people here don't remember is that China is only a fairly recent first-class member of the international trading community and that was hugely controv

What many people here don't remember is that China is only a fairly recent first-class member of the international trading community and that was hugely controversial at the time. Up until the Clinton administration there was a status of Most Favored Nation that countries had to get. There was a lot of pressure from companies eager to sell to China's 1B+ people and there was a lot of politicking about this. I believe it was a big reason why "most favored nation" was renamed to "permanent normal trade relations" in 1998. Tiananmen Square was still fresh in peoples minds having only happened less than a decade earlier. China at the time also sold military technology to countries the US wasn't on good terms with. So China obtained MFN/PNTR in 2000 and joined the WTO the year after. One argument used for this was that the only way to make China play by the rules is to be a member. What's become increasingly clear however is that China did not, does not and probably will not play by the rules. The examples that spring to mind are: - Wholesale intellectual property theft from Western companies. To be fair, many Western companies are complicit in this. Eager to open up new markets they agree to "partnerships" with Chinese companies that are thinly veiled IP heists. - Theft of military secrets and technology. - Sale of products to sanctioned nations (eg ZTE). - A concerted effort to ensure that no foreign company ends up owning a market in China. Take all the tech companies in the rest of the world and there's a Chinese equivalent (Google -> Baidu, Amazon -> Alibaba, Apple -> Huawei/ZTE/etc). This isn't an accident and it's not because foreign companies don't "get" the Chinese market. - The Chinese government and military have a large-scale and active electronic warfare program designed to steal IP, threaten companies and control discourse (eg anyone critical of the Chinese government). The big concern about this is that isn't rogue actors. This is state sanctioned to the highest levels. The rest of the world seems completely disinclined to tackle this. But at some point in the future you'll expect to see things like: - Companies won't do business in China - Companies won't do business with Chinese companies - Companies won't employ Chinese citizens (for fear of IP theft). On the last point, I'm honestly surprised the US government hasn't restricted Chinese-born people from working with any classified tech given the history of theft here. As to Huawei, this is a real propaganda piece by Bloomberg as anyone who is concerned about the security of their IP and their infrastructure should as part of their due diligence be assessing the risk of using networking gear from a company where there is a serious concern that the Chinese government or military may have compromised the code that hardware runs.