The allegation is not copying, the allegation is fraudulent agreements with US companies, and dishonest corporate espionage.

Can anyone really develop new technology, bring it to market, have it immediately brought by a competitor with zero R&D investment, and expect to compete? Is there something that is supposed to be magical about US technology that this scenario does not apply?

The articles cites some of the examples as "taking a photo of a disassembled circuit board" and "copying source code."

While I agree copying source code is bad, but doing so and maintaining someone else's code is a monumental task.

I think design, prototyping, commercialization, and iterations are a bigger task than maintaining an active product line. It's not 100% of the work when you can simply copy someone's work, but it might be 80%

Everyone except the United States, who figured out how to build them first.

Then use the car industry as an example: the American car manufacturers' internal combustion engines looks identical to those of the the Germans.

To quote you: "who figured out how to build them first."

In the Toyota factory museum in Japan they aren’t exactly ashamed of the fact that they bought, disassembled, and reverse engineered a Chrysler for their first few cars.

That's the opposite of espionage. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Reverse engineering is a legal form of IP imitation everywhere.

Isn't some engineer opening up a box and taking pictures something mentioned in this indictment?

That was one of the simpler ones. They are also alleged to have stolen router firmware. But frankly if you've ever tried to just "take over" even an open source project it's not a trivial task to just take someone's source code and be able to master it.

In fact it's a standard open source business model to make money off the expertise on the open source code base.

Indeed, but it’s not the Japanese whining all day and all night about how the Chinese are stealing their precious gifts to the world. :)