The idea that "the stock market" prevents companies from doing any long-term development is one of the most delusional, easy to disprove memes going. Public companies in America have been churning out game-changing technology forever. The Chinese are ahead on 5G, so suddenly the system is a failure?
Going public is a capital raising mechanism, nothing more. And it's probably driven a few orders of magnitude more innovation than it's hindered. The disdain for public markets (or finance in general) on these boards is bizarre.
The current situation was completely predictable, but industrial policy has a bad name in rentier capitalist circles that dominate our policy apparatus.
I am not expert on networking equipment by any means. But I would assume that 5g equipment is built upon previous technology.
It would thus follow that stealing the preceding, underlying technology and then focusing resources on building out the 5g part of the tech would be the fastest/cheapest way to become a leader in 5g.
https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/bts-mcrae-huawei-is-t...
The reality is that Huawei has been outspending its competitors in R&D by a wide margin for over two decades, because the latter are managed by bean counters in thrall to the stock market's short-term horizon. Eventually, the difference would show.
One further wrinkle is that Chinese 5G uses frequencies like 3-4 GHz that are hogged by the military in the US. US carriers have to resort to millimeter wave frequencies in the 30+ GHz range that can't penetrate a door, let alone a building, and are thus mostly useless for 5G penetration outside a very few congested open-air locations, and thus their 5G technology is at a severe disadvantage over the Chinese one:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/standards/how-am...
Most countries not aligned with China or the West will prefer the Huawei technology: superior technology yet cheaper, and far less expensive to deploy and operate. Any country that doesn't puts itself at a competitive disadvantage over others that do. The US may yet convince its European allies to shun Huawei, but it will come at a severe cost.