It is worthwhile noting that people are sensitive to titles like this, and "chinese spy" is probably an unwarranted term. It does seem true that the Apple employee was taking all kinds of IP with him to a competitor. That's illegal, and theft.

When Levandowski was caught apparently taking files from Waymo (allegedly to give to Uber) he wasn't characterized as an "american spy".

[edit] When you say "American spy" there is the implication of a professional connection to the US govt apparatus. So we don't use this term for private American industrial espionage, it's sloppy, and deliberately misleading at worst. I think this is probably a privately motivated deal to make some money, as in my Levandowski example.

>When Levandowski was caught apparently taking files from Waymo (allegedly to give to Uber) he wasn't characterized as an "american spy".

That's a silly comparison. Ignoring the obvious and significant differences between how the US and Chinese governments act in this regard, a better example would be an American citizen working for a Chinese company who was caught with stolen IP on his way back to the US to hand over to a US competitor? Which words, I wonder, would be used in China to describe such a person?

>It is worthwhile noting that people are sensitive to titles like this

Well maybe they shouldn't be. There's no need to search for reasons to be offended; there more than enough actual, honest to God problems in the world to get riled up over.

It’s normal to note spies with ties to foreign powers assigned the domonym of that country.

Several times daily we see “Russian hackers”, Russian bots, etc. No one complains. From time to time we see “Israeli spy”, Iranian Spy”, Russian Spy.

It’s no big deal. In those countries you also see allegations of “American spies” even when the accused isn’t a spy, like in N Korea, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, etc., etc. No one in the public cries about it. Of course family of the wrongfully alleged do get rightly concerned.

His actions were characterized as industrial espionage; this seems like splitting hairs.

Did you read the article? This is the second paragraph:

> The FBI reportedly arrested a Chinese national working for Apple the day before he was set to fly back to China with thousands of files on his laptop that contained Apple’s intellectual property. He was reportedly planning to take all the info to one of Apple’s competitors in China.

It's pretty accurate to characterize him as a Chinese spy.

There's a certain level of competition between countries and it makes sense for Americans to want to keep American-made IP in America. There's nothing wrong with that.

>Did you read the article?

Yep, in fact I posted another article on the same incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19037738

Queue 'America shouldn't complain, because of Samuel Slater' arguments...

Not America shouldn’t complain, rather America shouldn’t claim a moral high ground. Complaint is part of serving your own interests, totally necessary and justified.

Yup, just like America can't claim moral high ground over Mauritania because of large amounts of slavery happening there, because after all America was all into slavery 200 years ago.

What's the point of having moral high ground if you try to turn it into soft power and the other people laugh you out of the room for hypocrisy?

The best we can do is admit it was wrong and we aren't infallible, have empathy for others on the same path, and help them see what we see. After all, only a few generations ago it seemed like the natural order of things. If only 10% of people disagreed, how sure would you be that you land in that 10%?

Stepping back to today, what practices do 90% of us engage in which our children's children will look back at us as barbaric? Statistically it doesn't look good for us.

> America was all into slavery 200 years ago.

American didn't abolish de jure slavery until 153 years ago.

It retained de facto slavery for much longer, as it did little to enforce the prohibition on except terminating overt chattel slavery until WWII (the federal order to federal prosecutors announcing the policy shift that stopped eseentially ignoring this was issued five days after Pearl Harbor, 77 years ago.) [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591

Okay, I edit my previous statement to be: "just like America can't claim moral high ground over Mauritania because of large amounts of slavery happening there, because after all America was all into de facto slavery 77 years ago."

I don't believe the point is particularly changed though.

Good luck with that, maybe you'll make it work.

Were they "allegedly caught" or are they "allegedly a Chinese spy"? :)

the article doesn't help sluice that out much... "Another alleged Chinese spy has been caught apparently trying to steal secrets from Apple’s mysterious self-driving car project."