There isn’t anything magic here. It’s not that China would have particularly special capabilities over this equipment. It’s that it’s so full of vulnerabilities that any nation state (or really any determined good hacker) can get into these systems.
Also, to most of the world whether US is spying or China is makes 0 practical difference, both can and will be used against given country when decided (ie secret services helping 'their' big companies win big contracts due to leaking some related secrets, many cases like this in the past).
It does make a practical difference. It is better to be spied on by the weakest power. That is probably still China if we blindly guess that their GDP is overstated and note that their military is less adventurous than the US.
In the Middle East, Eastern Europe and maybe Africa there is actually a good chance that the US spying will be used to overthrow your government or literally build an invasion plan. I have no idea how active they are in South America but I assume the sausage making process is ugly there too. I don't think China has been accused of doing either yet although I assume it is going to get started on government-toppling sooner or later.
India would be in a tough spot though. They should probably figure out how to produce telecoms gear through native companies if they haven't already.
The US knows how to manipulate with both the carrot and the stick.
It looks a lot like they've set up a puppet government in Ukraine, it seems a bit incredible that level of trust just developed out of the blue after Euromaidan. And the CIA would have been almost negligent not to be involved in managing the Euromaidan. It'd line up well with the leaked recordings of Victoria Nuland discussing who should be in government, the relatively suicidal stance Ukraine then took towards diplomacy with Russia and just be in character for the CIA.
I'd imagine the Belarusian government would look at that and much rather be using Huawei tech then Cisco. The risks are pretty obvious and one sided. And I doubt Ukraine is the only place the CIA have been moving in to in the east; any government in the region should be worried about US involvement in their politics.
This was completely on Russia and Janukovych without any possible influence of the CIA.
The Nuland phone call was after Janukovych fled the country even though an agreement had been reached. And yes, Nuland had an opinion on what a solution could/should look like.
It "looks like", but only if we glance casually at a couple of articles (or sometimes even just headlines of articles) here and there, without taking the time to, like, actually read them.
Or we pick up random partial factoids (like about the Nuland cable), and we start thinking "Hmm, this would align with [some vastly larger mental model we have the world works]" without stopping to think about what the factoid is actually about, or whether it actually has much of any significance to begin with.
What you have here is article that says "CIA, Ukraine" and you're thinking right way it's about Ukraine being a puppet state. But that's not something the article asserts, or even comes close to talking about as a topic.