1) force foreign companies to "partner" with local Chinese companies. This leads to the joint ventures using backdoors and surveillance against the users
2) Once the partnership is mature enough, the local partners can steal the technology and know-how of the foreigners, and then start competing with them. And because they are local Chinese companies, Chinese customers tend to prefer them, too, to the detriment of the foreign companies.
This strategy seems to have worked rather well against pretty much anything except super-entrenched foreign products, like say Windows (which is mostly pirated in China anyway, but without that piracy, Windows would have been relegated to a niche OS a long time ago in China).
Even Intel is getting kicked out of China, slowly but surely, as Chinese companies start doing both chip design and chip manufacturing. It didn't help that the U.S. government also recently banned Intel from selling server chips to China in supercomputer contracts because China was doing "nuclear testing" on those supercomputers (Say what? That sounds like a BS reason the Obama administration used to cover-up for something else, but anyways, it still hurts Intel and other American chip companies).
What worries me most is not just that those local Chinese companies are starting to bring in billions and billions of dollars every year, which allows them to expand globally (backdoors and all) and acquire foreign companies from abroad, too, but also that Chinese tech is starting to be preferred by foreign companies (again, with backdoors and all).
Take for instance Baidu's "self-driving platform", Apollo. Volvo is going to adopt that in its self-driving cars, and there are other carmakers that are considering the same, too. Are you FREAKING KIDDING me? They want to build millions and millions of Chinese self-driving cars over which you'll have no control with Chinese backdoors in them? What could possible go wrong?!
I mean I'm sure the NSA will try the same in the U.S. with "lawful intercepts" and whatnot, but I doubt most will accept it and I think those that do will pay the price for it. But the Chinese backdoors are pretty much a certainty.
And yes, I know, Baidu's platform is "open source", but first off, I don't think 100% of it will be open source. They might release certain add-ons that the carmakers will want that aren't open source and public.
And second, if the Chinese spy agencies are anywhere near as smart as the NSA, the backdoors they will put there will look like some "dumb mistake" a programmer made a long time ago. It will be discovered 5 years later, patched as a regular bug, and things will go on as usual (with 3 other backdoors/intentional vulnerabilities thrown into the code).
