Our processors are hardware-level compromised at the die level with back doors that are independent of the OS being run on them.
The Chinese have adopted the same stance. Clearly they get it.
Yup, programmers will do that, it's in their nature. Back in the 1970s and 1980s I was writing system code for IBM mainframes, OS/360 and up. I put back-doors in for myself. None destructive. One of them would sense if I was running a program, and give it highest priority over anything else running. Always got my results first before anything else among thousands of programs running at the same time. I left the systems group and checked ten years later, and my code was still there through various upgrades of the OS.
If people don't understand what it does, they leave the code alone. Probably true of reverse engineering chips.