It was always bad, but for many years its energy resources were unmatched, so no country could keep up.
Today the gap is not so big anymore.

Oh yeah, let’s call someone ‘using open source’ in terms of ‘to exploit’.

Maybe the US should also ban GNU licences, open hardware licences and force Linux to sell itself to Google while we’re at it. Then destroy all distros except chromeOS.
After all, China could exploit these open source software projects.

And in this way one no longer has to be confused about copyright and copyleft being opposite ends of free democratic nations and communist authoritarian empires. /s