China is unique in their institutional use of criminal IP theft as a state strategy to catch up and eventually surpass the United States.

Are they? As a Canadian I'm quite ashamed of the hacking my goverment did in regards to Brazil. I'd presume Brazil is one of many.

But that was not to rip off their technology. Not similar to what China is doing at all.

I’m not making a moral judgment about which is worse, just pointing out that they are very different activities and outcomes.

We started with IP and now we're saying tech? Isn't IP IP, from a schematic, to a internal price list, or an org chart? Surly hacking to get ahead is hacking to get ahead, irrispective of industry.

No, it isn't.

This. I'm pretty fed up with this narrative. It's always either Russians or Chinese.

Apart from (quite obviously) USA there is a handful of other powerful actors (ie. Israel, UK) in the game but you rarely get to read about it.

It just makes me trust "western" news outlets less.

The “western” news spent a good part of 2015 covering Edward Snowden’s in great detail and sealing great damage to US reputation, despite the Chinese, Russian etc. governments having or aspiring for similar programs.

Generally the “western” (or at least American) press has a strong tradition of criticizing its own government, much stronger than some other nations. Criticizing foreign governments or running negative stories about them does not take away from that. There are lots of positive China stories in the MSM as well.

It’s the collusion between state and business that make this chilling. It’s not just information gathering driving policy decisions it’s IP theft from a state actor that is transferred to local players to compete with US companies.

there was plenty of intel gathered in Russia during the cold war that got fed directly to private contractors in the US. I would be stunned if it were not still happening.

Definitionally (for the word unique), they are not unique. Even this thread mentions other economies. So, You're right.

They might be the biggest by economic scale and consequence. They might be the most visible.

But this is not unique.

So IP theft is okay?

It's not a theft. Whatever information they took from hacked computers probably stayed on those computers, why would they erased it. It's copying. Not a theft. Theft is when someone break in to your apartment and steal your CD collection leaving you with nothing.

If you're a corporate entity and the copying of data you paid to assemble leaves you with no competitive advantage it's a lot closer to theft than your run of the mill "copying is theft" assertion.

It’s theft if you use that information to create products from that data for which you didn’t have to pay R&D for. This is what IP theft is. Don’t muddy the waters with a technical description of the crime.