And hey, our (American) IP laws were a lot less strict when we were catching up to the British Empire.
Countries generally try to set their laws up to benefit their industries (to the extent possible).
Lots of links to Wikipedia lists of examples in other threads here.
Then the US will try to incur some diplomatic cost for China, which does have a pretty bad reputation on this front... it's all part of the big game.
All developing nations, whether China or Russia or Somalia, don't enforce some laws. Sometimes it's lack of strong state, sometimes it's lack of beurocratic capacity, or a concious decision. Anyone going into these countries is aware of this.
IP, Labour laws and bribes in case of China.
Clearly western companies take advantage of the two latter, and cry foul about the former. Massive hypocracy.
Meanwhile western government dont enforce their own laws for any kindof accoutability of major business leaders. Chinese will answer for IP theft on the same day CEO of Nestle will go to jail for taking advantage of child labour and slavery in their supply chains.
So probably we will have to wait for judgement day
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01...
The thing is,anybody these IP theft cases are also against Chinese law, they his choose to ignore it when it benefits them.
Corruption is everywhere, it's not an excuse to strive for anything less than right and truth. "Bevause they did it" is not a good reason.
On a more serious note, I find it quite unfair that Western conoany go into China to take advantage of loose labour laws and child labour, and then they complain when loose IP laws hit them. Like you knew what the deal was from the outset.
Lastly not every society believes in the concept of intellectual property, it is not even clearly defined - for instance EU does not issue software patents.