I saw no evidence of it when we went to China for Nortel. They confiscated our RF test gear and we sat in a hotel room for almost three weeks waiting to get it back. They could have just as easily bought it on the open market and copied it. It was commonly available test gear, nothing secret. When we did get it back it was obvious it had been disassembled, inspected and reassembled, only nothing worked. Kinda reminds me of that Chinese crescent wrench I threw into some bushes on a site in Kentucky after it jammed at a most inopportune moment. It did look like a crescent wrench, though.....
They do everything on the cheap. Look at it from their perspective. Why should they have to go out and buy it when these Nortel guys just delivered it to them free of charge?
Your story is not the first I’ve heard about the Chinese trying to reverse engineer everything they can get their hands on.
I also laughed about the wrench story. The thing is just like the Japanese tools were once crap the Chinese ones are becoming better and better. Especially since the west insists on giving them fully working factories to reverse engineer!
The same thing happened to me! We were installing a Voice Response platform, and the equipment was tied up in Customs for 2 weeks. When it arrived on site, it had obviously been dis-assembled, and half the hard drives were missing. It failed to boot up, and despite out best efforts on site, it never did work again.
Once we got it back to the States and tore it down, it was clear that someone had been going at the circuit board with a soldering iron, probably attaching wires to defeat the copy protection.
We wrote the entire project off.