Before Xi left, he and Obama announced an accord that included the first curbs on using the web to steal intellectual property. Oddly, it seemed to work right away: Mandiant and other firms saw a marked drop-off in that kind of hacking by the Chinese. Painter believes that Xi looked into the future and saw that “a few years from now, people are going to be stealing industrial designs from the Chinese, and he had to get ahead of it.” In fact, people have already gone after the Chinese—and most of them are Russian.
