China has the luxury of being a totalitarian state. Xi does not need to worry about upcoming elections. Unfortunately in Europe any moves that requires great sacrifice might be political suicide.

Eh as much as I would like it to be true, I would take the word of captured enemy combatants with a grain of salt.

Question would be how to track sales of said data outside of Italy.

I think they hate “the west” in general as the population can criticize and pressure those in power. Whereas dictatorships have unquestioned control.

In this case they should have been using government systems for internal transparency and opsec.

Ironically this scandal was caused by fools

Frankly I think Trump sees western nations not led by dictators as threats.