> IP includes trade secrets, industry know-how, and human expertise

These are the hardest kinds of IP to reproduce or "steal", though. I can believe that direct infringement of formal IP rights might be an issue, but this sort of more 'tacit' knowledge is a different ballpark.

Trade secrets and human expertise are incredibly easy to steal, but in the US at least trade secrets are protected by law unless explicitly disclosed to the public and human expertise is constrained by non compete agreements.

On the other hand, for a country, any company operating within its boarders using is ripe for exploitation. Unless a foreign company uses 100% foreign workers, and eschews all government inspections, then the knowledge is already exposed to your citizens.

With the way CCP policy is, if a trade secret is exposed to anyone on China, it’s effectively lost completely since the government can directly disclose it to who ever they wish.

Non-compete agreements are quite weak in California, and yet that's where much of the U.S. technology industry is located. This suggests that weaker enforcement of such "protection" can actively promote growth, not just exploitation.

They aren't hard to steal when your building another companies products for them. Eventually you're the one that has all that not them.

20 years ago I was saying the mistake American Businessmen were making is they thought they somehow owned all those factories in China. And they did not at all. Since then Chinese companies have been taking over design as well. You spec it, they figure out how to build it at scale. All that IP they own not you.