What about Chinese tech sector? Yes, there is a lot of protectionism exercised by the Chinese government, but still Huawei and other big players are not funded by the government, they have to compete really hard to survive.
> Tens of billions of dollars in financial assistance from the Chinese government helped fuel Huawei Technologies Co.’s rise to the top of global telecommunications, a scale of support that in key measures dwarfed what its closest tech rivals got from their governments.
Are you sure? One of the bigger reasons why Huawei is having troubles with rolling out it's hardware (routes, 5G) in Europe and US is how entangled they are with the government.
> but still Huawei and other big players are not funded by the government
Is that a joke ? Huawei is probably the Chinese tech company with the most government involvement. They're a strategic company propped-up as a point of national policy.
Actually the most government funded companies are those companies are failing, state-owned enterprises, which employ many low-skilled people. Meng tried to sell Huawei to Motorola for $7.5billion. The deal didn't go through because CEO change in Motorola. Of course, Chinese government would be a client for Huawei as well as Microsoft and many other companies. Also government owned funds would invest in commercial entities to make money. I have not done full research on Huawei, so I cannot say there is no money invested in Huawei.
If you are worrying about Chinese government controlling the company, actually in China, the government does not need to fund a company to do that. For example, the poverty elimination program was set out by the government, all major companies would be encouraged to participate. If you are 'encouraged' by the government in anywhere around the world, you would participate for a better relationship with the government.
Uhm... Because China needs tech sector as money source, not a money sink maybe? So it is implausible they would spend money on a tech company. I'm not aware of any facts in favor of the contrary.
As far as I can tell the Chinese government primarily sees becoming the technological leader mainly as a strategic goal and not as money source. Not in the short term at least.
Huawei got its start by blatantly stealing IP from Cisco and other companies, which is essentially a large subsidy of R&D. That strategy was only possible because the Chinese government shielded them from legal problems.
In other words, the Chinese government effectively forced Huawei's competitors to give them a large subsidy.
