The problem is the world is divided into factions, and China is a massive country that just happens to be a separate faction, which means they can't divide labor with the US, they have to compete head on, or else they won't get a fare share of the pie.
US had a head start on development, which means these two factions didn't have a level playing ground to compete for a piece of the pie. Therefore China must protect to get back on level playing ground.
The pie is not a fixed size. The Chinese could produce something new and innovative instead of clones and sell those to the US, making the pie bigger for everyone.
Protectionism is bad in general - it works until everyone starts doing it, then everyone is worse off. But the benefits of protectionism in the short term is not equally distributed and China definitely has greater incentive.
It worked for their manufacturing ecosystem, maybe it'll work for tech too.
One of the reasons that should hit home to the HN crowd is that Huawei simply up and 100% cloned some of the highest-end Cisco routers in their early days.
While I'm no fan of patents, when you clone something down to the bugs (which is how Cisco demonstrated the cloning) you deserve to get some penalty.
Huawei was banned from government contracts, not from the U.S. [edit: afaik]
Also, it appropriated so much of Cisco's IP (quite poorly), at least as it was establishing itself as a network equipment vendor, that I wouldn't call Huawei innovative, not back then.
It was a pretty clear case of cloning very expensive tech for a dime with MASSIVE government support.
