IMHO, government has little real power to pragmatically curtail this as a formal trade issue. If it's legally not allowed, it's not like employees in China can'

IMHO, government has little real power to pragmatically curtail this as a formal trade issue. If it's legally not allowed, it's not like employees in China can't walk away with the tech anyway. The question is where you want to build your technology base and where short term greed drives you to build. Private IP of companies isn't any sort of public commons. By deciding to build stuff in China, they've already left the only arguable commons part of that - the common labor knowledge base that forms naturally where you put your actual build operations.