I found lots of links saying US does 'industrial espionage' but no one says this helps US companies.

> The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it does collect information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing. "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of - or give intelligence we collect to - U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line," it said in a statement

http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/30/news/airbus-germany-nsa-spyi...

China has wide spread state sponsored stealing to help their companies. US does not seem to.

Plenty said that. The problem is that the reports are old with Google et al prioritizing new, ad-generating content. Even if you have links, many of those pages' links will be dead. It's online decay. I just spent an hour trying to find some reports of it from mainstream sources based on pieces of things I remembered. Here's two:

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1996-11-01/news/1996306048_...

https://nypost.com/2000/07/10/giant-u-s-spy-vacuum-sparks-a-...

A lot of it happened in the Advocacy Center and/or Office of Executive Support. The European Parliament's report on Echelon talks about some of it:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/EPRS/EPRS_STUDY_538877_Affaire...

Far as that last part, the U.S. does something quite different: a corrupt Congress makes patent and copyright laws so ridiculously strong that they make compatability/competition with big, U.S. companies anywhere from difficult to impossible. The best examples are in smartphone market where Apple tries to block Chinese and Korean products. Microsoft also pulled in about a billion in Android royalties despite not contributing anything to Android's success.

Also note that a lot of Silicon Valley heavyweights started out with big funding from the government, esp DARPA. Kind of similar to state-sponsoring of companies in China. From there, the U.S. companies legally rob or block competition via vaguely-worded, broad, long-lasting patents. Recently, competition blocking API rulings. The Chinese do it via spies and suppliers that iterate fast. I don't see one having moral high ground over the other if they're both doing things that harm the many to benefit a tiny, rich few legally backed with bribery or other corruption.

we'll take his work for it then.

because, you know, the us does not steal trade secrets, which proves that trade secrets are not stolen, by the us.