Someone at one of Cisco’s competitors once told me that Huawei copied their routers down to the English silk screened assembly instructions on the PCBs.
Friend of mine also does contracting work for them. They never pay their bills on time apparently.
I know a guy who used to work for TI who talked about the Chinese knocking off chips, right down to purposely-introduced defects added specifically to detect such counterfeiting. Problem was, knowing that it happened didn't do much good. Ended up moving production of some stuff to the Philippines because there was literally no recourse.
I remember when I worked in a trade company, one of most unusual things to sell was a maskset from a company that went bust.
Apparently a very common practice in China, companies were selling masksets of their discontinued ICs to companies lower on the ladder for them to manufacture relabelled/repackaged chips.
Grain of salt on the latter concern, because lots of big American companies are also infamous for not paying contractors on time. One of our best (huge) clients at my last company got more than a year into arrears with us, and friends at other companies have much more lurid stories than that.
Friend of mine also does contracting work for them. They never pay their bills on time apparently.