> As much as you can (rightly) criticize the US, particularly the current administration, the US still has the rule of law to a degree far larger than almost all of the rest of the world

And, conveniently, there are ad-hoc courts (FISA) for when you have to "legalize" massive surveillance.

> see all the actions and settlements with Swiss banks as examples

Meanwhile, banks at home apparently have no problem with this... As long as it benefits american corporations, of course.

> Contrast this to China. Questionable rule of law. Chinese companies and their leaders are certainly complicit with the Chinese government and intelligence agencies

Oh, I'm sure the NSA didn't have their support...:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...

> There have been recent stories about how the Muslim population is spied upon and/or put in "re-education" camps

Meanwhile in your country, 2% of your population is imprisoned (more than any other country in the world), and illegal immigrants are being detained FOR YEARS. Talk about "re-education camps"

> Xi Jinping is largely installed himself as a Putinesque dictator (eg term limits for the presidency were recently abolished).

The Clintons have been in power for how many years? What about the Bush family, Bolton and friends?

Also, have you ever questioned the amount of power US corporations have? Apparently not...

> Given a choice between the US spying on me and China, it wouldn't even be close. The US "wins" hands down.

I'm sure the US "wins" too, they can spy on you freely, and are said to be able to collect practically all your phone calls and 10% of all internet traffic (i.e., all data, excluding videos and other irrelevant stuff).

> China has aggressively pursued an agenda to further its national interest that includes the arguable exploitation of developing nations

They are literally copying what the US and Western powers have taught them. At least they don't bomb random countries thousands of miles away from their homeland under the argument of "freeing" them and "defending democracy", unlike US & EU neocolonial powers.

> As largely tech people here we all know something about security. To me it's obvious that ceding control of your network

And that includes trusting your own govt., right? People who "know something about security" should know that you simply can't do anything against governments... Much less against the most powerful govt. on this planet.

> Huawei (and others eg ZTE) have been caught here as bad actors and not actors I personally would trust if I had anything worth protecting.

Unlike those "accidental" backdoors in Cisco equipment, which your ISP probably trusts 100%?

> China plays favourites with its own companies

Exactly what the US govt. does when it talks about "national interests". Or, do you think your government is there to defend YOUR interests?

> It has clearly decided that it doesn't want a foreign company to control a local market, any local market, which is why you have the likes of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent instead of Google, Amazon and Facebook. And no it's not because foreign companies don't understand the Chinese market. It's because the Chinese government wills it

And they are right to do so. Why would they let a government that is known to play dirty control of their population? Obama, the democrat, a Nobel peace prize, bombarded 8 countries, even more than Bush Jr., yet people still believe he was a "good leader" and "better than Bush". It doesn't take much intelligence to notice the brainwashing...

> Access to China's 1B citizens has been dangled as a carrot to the developed world for years.

The US has been doing that for decades. And anyone who dares disobey gets a coup d'etat or destroyed.

> It should be clear that the game is rigged.

Indeed... It is rigged by the US (govt and corporations), against anyone who wants to compete fairly.

> So, if China has decided not to relinquish control of domestic markets to foreign companies, why shouldn't the US respond in kind?

Yeah, the US should mind its own business, leave China AND the rest of the world alone, and not play world police, stop cheating, stop imposing its ideology, and so on.

Seriously, go read some history books.