Yes, but practically speaking, China has almost no power at all to bother you if they successfully spy on you, aside of course from passing any secrets they lea

Yes, but practically speaking, China has almost no power at all to bother you if they successfully spy on you, aside of course from passing any secrets they learn from you to your Chinese competitors. The US, on the other hand, is where you're located (in this example) and can easily use any information gained against you in a large multitude of ways. Basically, everyone would probably be better off just assuming any network gear has backdoors open to the government of the country that it came from, then just adopting security policies to mitigate this, and buying network gear from countries that aren't their own.