China's tactics aren't really any better (allow blatant IP theft).

I suppose the only real difference was that this wasn't well-known in advance. It's like the Joker's statement about people losing their shit when something happens unannounced but being orderly when much worse is announced in advance.

China hasn't taken any actions comparable to this. This would be like shutting down Apple's production lines in China with no warning - essentially a coup de grace to a major tech company.

We already don't trust China though. That's the difference.

Who are "we" here? Readers of hacker news, or your family which you may or may not have the right to represent?

> What they're doing to Huawei will have nefarious consequences to the US

And what consequences do you imagine there will be?

The consequences might be like this (in addition to many other possible forms):

Previously, my little factory spent 100% of the budget for component x and component y on buying from American suppliers (quality and price are both very good).

But going forward, we plan to spend 70% to buy from Americans, 20% from other countries, and 10% to fund demestic research, and we will reduce the 70% part as soon as we can manage.

You can imagine if multiplying our small adjustment by the actions of hundreds of thousands of similar businesses around the world who are watching closely what's going on recently, then the interests of American businesses will probably be severely affected.

What you describe is already 100% what is going on with the technology transfers.

Countries around the world will realize that it is not safe to trust in the US as a player in the global market. This may not seem big initially, but market barriers around technology will start to crop up everywhere in developed nations.

You mean like China forcing foreign companies to turn over technology to Chinese companies to eventually be used to compete against them? Who could ever trust a country that does that, or that imprisons millions of people based on their religion?