I manage the IT for a SMB in the non-profit mental health space, and am connected through another role to our state’s cybersecurity fusion center. My small, insignificant network has scanning attempts run on it a few thousand times a day. Several hundred times a day we will log attacks from various vectors. Looking at the stats every month, going back a decade, the source of all of these is: #1) Russia, #2) China. Every. Time. We present a fat ransomware target, but have no IP to steal, so why the interest? A couple of reasons, courtesy of the fusion center and the local FBI office: first, supply chain attacks: we are partnered with larger medical groups, insurance companies, the state government, and research universities, and using trusted connections to get into those upstream entities is sometimes easier than attacking the front door. I have a small security budget comparatively. Second: botnets/zombies: taking over systems from within the US and making your traffic domestic, or even local to your target helps obfuscate the source of the attack, and ultimately why everyone should care. Not just about China, but about security in general - unpatched home PCs have been used to host and distribute malware, spam and even CP. I certainly wouldn’t want that on my home network. Even if someone didn’t care about that, Americans can be trusted to fall back on: “they’re taking something of yours” - they’re using your bandwidth and you’re paying for it. I believe the Chinese citizens just want the same things American, German, Bulgarian, and East Elbonian citizens want - to live life and be happy (in our parlance; “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”). But the Chinese government however, has a 100-year plan to be the sole economic power in the world, and the way they’re trying to get there isn’t playing nicely in the sandbox.

Because the CCP is run by a powerful sociopaths famous for stealing information and abusing human rights.

We've had our spray nozzle copied by the Chinese. Industrial espionage is not just high tech.

Chinese espionage does not benefit you in any way. The preferred amount for citizens and governments would be zero.

Domestic ~~spying~~ surveillance (can be argued) prevent/catch crimes. So some level of surveillance the benefit of less crime is worth the intrusion to the average citizen.

Suppose you were Superman and China was Lex Luthor. Would you feel comfortable with China knowing you were weak to kryptonite?

Both. China is where most consumer tech comes from, and the rest often includes parts from China as well. Taiwan has TSMC which makes all the big CPUs, but honestly all the small stuff like consumer electronics comes mostly out of China. If they did want to integrate some sort of spying they would have the opportunity, and in the past individual threats to the state of many countries have had supply chain attacks carried out, so it is not an unfounded fear.

That all said, China is run by the CCP, an ostensibly Communist party, so red scare, not to mention Chinese, so racism, and Party, because Americans are against fun, or at least in government they seem to be. China also has an abysmal record on human rights, though coming from anyone in the west criticism is somewhat hypocritical given prison labour, proping up dictatorships, coups, exploiting slave labour, and so on. Nobody is doing a perfect job, nobody is saintly, but there are fair and unfair criticisms against China as a nation state and those do inform some of the fear of their potential for spying.

Now TikTok, Reddit, Meta, etc... There are the really scary tools with far too little attention.

Not a US citizen, but i guess no one like their data get send to foreign country, especially the authoritarian one, just like China doesn't want their citizens data get send to US. It's really just both side very aware of what the other can do and will do, especially after seeing what russian can do in 2016 US election.

I mean, the subject of “Chinese Espionage in the United States” has a fairly lengthy page all of its own on Wikipedia with examples and concerns. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_United_States

Probably one of the most notable examples:

Between 2010 and 2012, intelligence breaches led to Chinese authorities dismantling CIA intelligence networks in the country, killing and arresting a large number of CIA assets within China.[43] A joint CIA/FBI counterintelligence operation, codenamed "Honey Bear", was unable to definitively determine the source of the compromises, though theories include the existence of a mole, cyber-espionage, compromise of Hillary Clinton's illicit classified email server as noted by the intelligence community inspector general,[44] or poor tradecraft.[43]Mark Kelton, then the deputy director of the National Clandestine Service for Counterintelligence, was initially skeptical that a mole was to blame.[43]

In January 2018, a former CIA officer named Jerry Chun Shing Lee[note 1] was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport, on suspicion of helping dismantle the CIA's network of informants in China.[47][48]

And that’s just one we all know about. Not to mention a rich history of Chinese state-sponsored corporate espionage and a history of let’s say playing fast and loose with international norms, human rights, etc.

I can't speak for other Americans (USA, in particular, which is who I assume you meant), but for me it's the nature of the oligarchical regime and their views on individualism. I've read the Chinese CSL, and spent a couple of days in a session presented by international lawyers and security professionals explaining what it meant for our business, how we needed to navigate it, and how it was being implemented. It's scary.

Information is power; specific information about you is power over you. It's control.

As for the government, I think it's more a matter of the fact that China is far more well positioned and equipped to surveil US assets. Russia is bumbling, pre-occupied, and doesn't make any computer components we use. Chinese chips, on the other hand, are in everything. The US is worried that, in a conflict, we could discover that China is able to simply... turn off all of the F35s. Or shut down or coopt firing systems on our war ships. Or disable coms or NV gear of ground troops. All of our modern equipment is computerized to more or lesser degree, and the failure of even seemingly simple resisters, sourced from China, could result in misoperation of gear, at best. If the espionage is more sophisticated, with more important components, it's conceivable China could locate and monitor assets; missiles which ignore counter measures and always hit because the target is broadcasting a homing signal.

Most off these hypotheticals are probably not within the realm of current technology, and that what access China is able to embed in computer components is far more limited. But we don't really know, and it's far more dangerous to underestimate than to overestimate capabilities.

the five eyes nations are all worried about china

it's mostly about stealing industrial and military secrets but i don't think they see china as an offensive threat

Because China is the new Russia Commie menace

The USA pretends to care about espionage but has zero trouble allowing all of its manufacturing to flee there. As long as the big boys are making money, it's worth every risk, amiright?

While a certain extent of it is just paranoia, there's also the fact that China as a nation has a long standing arrogance about how it views others that the Xi regime seems a little too eager to return to.

A rather infamous incident involving the guy who basically is China's founding father and great liberator revolved around him being kidnapped by Qing agents in London, because the imperial throne had long presumed that their authority was absolute everywhere, and saw zero reason why they should consider not arresting someone on another country's soil.

I bring this incident up because it's what the legitimate security concern actually revolves around, China has begun dispatching "police agents" to their embassies who are basically there to kidnap and intimidate chinese nationals who aren't acting "chinese enough", and in extreme cases drag them back to beijing by their hair.

This obviously extends to dissidents who foolishly presumed they could escape Beijing's wrath by not living in China, and to anyone seen as aiding and abetting them who aren't high profile enough to draw attention if they get roughed up or even kidnapped themselves.

American privacy invaders are looking at you, chinese privacy invaders are parasitically attaching themselves into your eye sockets so they can look at everyone you're looking at, and use you as an unwitting informant on anyone they're tracking.

It's like that bug that eats and then replaces fishes' tongues, only if the bug was big brother and you were hyptnotized into staring at some shitty minecraft parkour while it eats your eyeball out and plugs itself into your optic nerve.

TikTok of course advertises this as a fun feature that encourages group viewing by presenting content based on your interests and also the interests of those around you "as a conversation starter."

We (the US) off-shored our manufacturing labor to China because of cheap labor. We were able to continue to reap much of the benefits of this production with our intellectual property (trade secrets, patents, etc).

China will inevitably catch up in the IP game and have been quickly doing so, often through corporate espionage, sending students to study in Western schools, and just from experience building most of these physical goods.

It's IP theft and seen as cheating. And will erode the US IP dominance faster than we'd like.

I'm pretty on the fence over it as an American personally. IP laws in general are kind of bullshit but also, we're on our back foot economically because we have no infrastructure to build anymore. And if we no longer have the IP dominance, we have zero economic leverage.

And all that's ignoring all the governmental and civic espionage that has other uncomfortable implications.

China has been demonised by the west for 100's of years, it's nothing new https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril