One can argue that PRISM was in place long before China was doing anything real. So US and allies set the tone of this global topic decades ago. China decided they will go their own way, because they could.
This is all just a theatre as mentioned, long term planned escalation with some form of conflict inevitable. Not judging, it makes sense for each side to act as they do, but these congress hearings were a farce with decided outcome long before they were even announced, not some fair public discussion.
Two decades ago, the Chinese military was actively raiding Nortel's IP directly from their servers. Regardless of when and what the US government is doing, Huawei and ZTE's tech is built off of rampant state-sponsored IP theft and shouldn't be used and can't be trusted.
There's no way to deny that Huawei was years ahead of competition with their 5G offerings, so it seems this is much more a story about telecom becoming patent trolls rather than R&D focused companies, something something creating value to shareholders.
This is all just a theatre as mentioned, long term planned escalation with some form of conflict inevitable. Not judging, it makes sense for each side to act as they do, but these congress hearings were a farce with decided outcome long before they were even announced, not some fair public discussion.