It's hard to coherently sum up the response to Chinese hacking, because it's as big a component of the public dialog as NSA spying is.

However, I do think there's a difference between remarks about Chinese hacking and NSA spying. Outrage about NSA spying seems always to be moral. Outrage over Chinese hacking seems more practical: it's taken as given that China is going to sponsor hackers and that they're really good at it.

Look at the recent OPM debacle. Virtually all the coverage I see about it is about how OPM (and the USG more broadly) fell down on the job, not about we should retaliate against the people who broke in.

I'm pretty confident that if you were to do a study of American media coverage of the events, or a survey of American public sentiment regarding Chinese hacking, they would both overwhelmingly indicate a perception of immorality.

Ditto outside of the USA.

I think U.S. government rhetoric about this has changed sharply and used to morally condemn the PRC, but has now virtually stopped doing so.

But that's just my intuition; I'd love to see it more properly and systematically studied.