I don't think China cares about my personal secrets nearly as much as the US does, but they are pretty actively engaging in state-sponsored corporate espionage.
Eventually they’ll be able to analyze it with AI, and use it to advance their own agenda. Whether you consider that a good thing, or a less bad thing than whatever the NSA does, is in the eye of the beholder.
But make no mistake, the CCP does not ‘not care’ about your personal info.
> I would trust them to protect the trade secrets of a business
Would you trust a US business to protect your personal secrets more than the US government? Why?
America cares more about corporate rights than human rights.
Foreigners have basically all the same rights as citizens under US law. Maybe you're thinking of the NSA's mandate to only collect foreign-bound US internet traffic, not domestic?
All I'm saying, and I guess this doesn't contradict what you were saying, is that for the rest of the world it makes no difference if we choose American or Chinese equipment since we'll be spied on either way.
This is only scratching the surface. Don't forget their extensive tracking and imprisonment of ethnic minorities, political "dissents", etc. Seeing how they treat their own people, I can only imagine what kind of pressure they'll be able to exert on small(relative to China) countries that gave them control of their communications systems.
UK security services inspected Huawei course, and found it messy, but otherwise unremarkable. This should be standard procedure and we should be good at it.
E.g. your nation has someone who speaks out against the Chinese govt or something as dumb as making fun of the Chinese president. Hand him over or else we flick a switch here and the power grid in your city X goes down and there's nothing you can do about it.
Why do yo think China is pushing Huawei so hard and vowing trade punishment against any nation in the EU or elsewhere if they stop Huawei? They want to control the future of those nations. This will give China every leverage they can get in terms of trade, compliance, security, etc. basically making each of these nations a vassal state to China.
The issue in your scenario is not who built the infrastructure, but who has remote access to it. Why would the manufacturer of (for instance) the PLCs controlling a substation have remote access to it? Wouldn't they be isolated in their own subnetwork, firewalled so that only a few hosts in the substation operator's network can reach it?
That's not special to China. No nation can be trusted in that way.