1. backdoored surveillance

2. belt and road

As odious as that technology is, as far as I know China is a major supplier of surveillance technology to the world's authoritarian governments.

Belt and Road is an international infrastructure investment (and direct construction) project, not sure how its related to technology. It's also no different from all other nations' international aid programs, in that it both helps the receiving nation and makes them indebted to the originator.

And western equipment is totally not backdoored, and has open source hardware and firmware so that anyone can verify it?

Just one of many examples: The WIV BSL-4 lab in Wuhan was built as a French-Chinese cooperation (modeled after a similar lab in Lyon, France) with the explicit goal to do joint experiments. But once it was built, the French were kicked out.

Sources？

Many, e. g. https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/310520/strange-sa...

FRANCE INVESTIGATION The strange saga of how France helped build Wuhan's top-security virus lab MAY 31, 2020 BY KARL LASKE AND JACQUES MASSEY The maximum-level biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the first of its kind to be built in China, and has been the centre of huge speculation since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic which originated in that city. The laboratory, which is equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) including dangerous viruses such as Ebola, was built with the help of French experts and under the guidance of French billionaire businessman Alain Mérieux, despite strong objections by health and defence officials in Paris. Since the laboratory's inauguration by prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve in 2017, however, France has had no supervisory role in the running of the facility and planned cooperation between French researchers and the laboratory has come to a grinding halt.

> French experts and researchers have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China despite the fact that France helped build the facility and that Paris and Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration, a Mediapart investigation can reveal.

> have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory > Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration

These are far from what was claimed by the OP

It seems to me research centers outside of China are used to recruit willing experts from other companies whose knowledge of proprietary information can then be unethically harvested and absorbed by Huawei.

That sounds like... How other research centers also work? If you're not hiring someone for their knowledge and experience on a topic, then what are you hiring that person for?

And when these people leave, they take their experience at Huawei with them. Now some other company benefits from Huawei's experience.

People hire me for my 10 years of DevOps experience so that I can help them implement practices. They don't hire me to reinvent DevOps from first principles without using any of my previous experience.

Just what part of hiring people for their experience is "unethical harvesting"? If there's evidence of people being specifically hired to diverge trade secrets of a previous employer, in violation of NDAs, then you'd actually have a case.