>most of Chinese people working at Airbus went to Comac 1000 km away to build an A320 clone. This isn't simply a case of people "freely switching jobs".
State directed espionage doesn't get hundreds/thousands of engineers to switch allegiances. Money does. Then the knowledge travels with them. Personal knowledge that Airbus like many Euro companies in China treated their local employees like shit.
Another example was ZTE/Huawei managed to poach Nortel and other Euro telcom empoyees in China was because mainland employees had very little advancement opportunities. This included foreign nationals like Canadians with PRC Chinese background. An aquaintence of Chinese Canadian background poached most of Nortel GuangZhou's engineering team because state companies simply compensated better and provided more opportunities. A few years later, he poached a bunch of engineers from state company back to a foreign one who promoted. That's the incentives driving these mass migrations. Many PRC talent would rather stay working with foreign multinations due to prestige and better conditions (nice offices etc), especially in the late 90s, but at the end of the day, there was a bamboo ceiling and they generally weren't respected. Of course state will continue to espionage, but don't estimate role of Western companies being racist biting self in the ass that drove mainland talent to work for domestic companies.
State directed espionage doesn't get hundreds/thousands of engineers to switch allegiances. Money does. Then the knowledge travels with them. Personal knowledge that Airbus like many Euro companies in China treated their local employees like shit.
Another example was ZTE/Huawei managed to poach Nortel and other Euro telcom empoyees in China was because mainland employees had very little advancement opportunities. This included foreign nationals like Canadians with PRC Chinese background. An aquaintence of Chinese Canadian background poached most of Nortel GuangZhou's engineering team because state companies simply compensated better and provided more opportunities. A few years later, he poached a bunch of engineers from state company back to a foreign one who promoted. That's the incentives driving these mass migrations. Many PRC talent would rather stay working with foreign multinations due to prestige and better conditions (nice offices etc), especially in the late 90s, but at the end of the day, there was a bamboo ceiling and they generally weren't respected. Of course state will continue to espionage, but don't estimate role of Western companies being racist biting self in the ass that drove mainland talent to work for domestic companies.