I’ve never seen evidence that US agents attempted to infiltrate Chinese companies to steal their secrets, meanwhile just one recent example is the FBI catching Chinese espionage on camera trying to steal glass trade secrets from Corning, also see the Google employee who tried to steal AI secrets, a while ago it was the Coca-Cola can lining formula
One way to look at the world is if there's no punishment, there was never any crime. It's pretty clear the US has been doing economic spying for at least more than 3 decades [0]. One famous incident I'm aware of was the CIA spying on Thomson-CSF and delivering the intelligence to Raytheon who were competitors in a contract bid. [1]
The thing about defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon is that if they do receive information from the CIA or NSA, they're not gonna talk about it for fear of losing the existing contracts they have, or losing bids in the future.
I would agree that spying on China is harder than say spying on France. But I wouldn't say it's impossible. The US just has to work 10 times as hard. I would also say that because of the regime, any Chinese turncoats would be have much less loose lips.
Snowden leaks -> NSA operation shotgiant infiltrated Huawei network for years. PRC ministers around then been quoted saying US had thoroughly infiltrated PRC networks. I'm pretty sure it was admitted as much in PLA Science of Military Strategy in 2010s. PRC just doesn't like publicizing how compromised they were until recently, now cybersecurity firms like QH360 regularly report on US cyber infiltration efforts.
James Mulvenon, leading expert on PRC cyber who was one of the loudest sirens 10 years ago also basically said there was mutual offensive attacks - something like "We hack them, they hack us". The distinction Americans and Mulvenon like to make back then was PRC civil military fusion = PRC can economically weaponize hacking, i.e. PRC can pass hacked blueprints to companies XYZ to develop vs US can't because NSA can't pick winners. Which is fair (unless it comes to stuff like Airbus vs Boeing or other strategic industries). But that's just sour grapes for admitting that PRC has a better system for industrial espionage.
Anecdotal, in PRC in the mid 90s, had dinner where diasphora Chinese at western telco was complaining about how PRC started hacking their networks, someone else at dinner worked for domestic telco (trying to poach), and used to technician in PLA sigint unit, complained about how US penetrated most of Chinese networks and lamenting how they were w decades behind in cyber.
us industrialization back in the early days of the country was largely based on illegal IP theft from british factories. thats just how it is when you're behind and trying to catch up
