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