[jccooper]

I like your entirely-appropriate scare quotes there. I can't see any reason to believe that Chinese or Russian hardware (or French for that matter) would be any less likely to be backdoored. I wouldn't trust any of it further than I could audit it myself--which makes it a tricky situation for second- or third-party users, since auditing the internal state of modern electronic gear is difficult-to-impossible. You can audit the communications, and hope you can detect any out-of-spec activity, but that's not easy either.

There's more political maneuvering going on here than any legitimate technical concern.