Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

It's dramatically faster and cheaper to steal than to invest decades and countless billions of dollars doing it the hard way.

The only way China can fully stand toe to toe with the US in the next two decades or so, is to aggressively plunder beneficial IP wherever they can. There has been no serious consequence for them doing so the past 30 years of their rise. It's not below their dignity, because the mission overrules all. They'll continue doing it until the cost is too high; their calculation is probably that by that point they will already be fully self-sustaining as a superpower. At that point they'll show you the door if you have a problem with it (or worse).

China very carefully plays by the hide your power and bide your time strategy. Xi recently admonished state media about bragging too heavily; that's all about playing down their strength. China's ideal is to play it down until they're strong enough so as to be beyond a reasonable challenge by other powers (at least in their sphere of influence, Asia broadly).

Why do all that when you can skip to printing money by knocking off something that already sells?

I fear that one day we will wake up and realise that we are behind, to discover that our friends in China have been innovating.

We have had this already with internet infrastructure. Whilst half of the USA and rural UK struggle along with internet served over fifty year old copper cables, in Eastern Europe, after the fall of the wall, countries such as Estonia were able to leapfrog typical Western infrastructure and lay fibre to the door for everyone. They might not have done so with Estonian made Cisco routers, however having this leapfrogged infrastructure in place fostered an environment of innovation - Skype being from Estonia.

In automotive there is a real risk for Western auto companies that they will not be able to compete with the electric cars that will be coming out of China. Chinese electric cars could be cosy and a really nice space to be in during one's commute, like an extension of one's living room and a good place to get work done. Meanwhile Western alternatives might still be trying to be yesteryear's status symbols, e.g. 'sporty' cars where the fake exhaust note, theoretical time around the Nurburgring and whatever else excites geriatric Top Gear presenters 'matters'.

A new generation of Western consumer might not want these 'dad cars' and just might prefer whatever comes out of China. There may be cheap plastics in these cars, they may not even have self-driving, but the sum of the parts, price and reliability might trump Western alternatives. We have had this before with VW and Japanese compact cars gouging out the U.S. Big Three. There was no rocket science in the VW Beetle but it was a better buy than what Detroit was offering at the time. Putting up tariffs and complaining about the Japanese merely copying didn't really help.