Absolutely! Industrial espionage has been practiced since there's been industries to steal from. If you do a survey of the literature today, you'll find that even more common than big-name government hacking is commercial industrial espionage -- either state-driven, as in the case of China, or competitively driven.

One of the more famous examples from history is the Rev. Father Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles, a Jesuit who traveled to China in 1698. At the time, Chinese porcelain was extraordinarily valuable in Europe -- one of the most luxurious of luxury products. In a series of letters, the Rev. d'Entrecolles spelled out the manufacture of Chinese porcelain and explained how it was done. Back in Europe, inventive people were already reverse-engineering Chinese porcelain (a porcelain factory opened in 1710, before d'Entrecolles' first letter) but d'Entrecolles' letters were devoured by those who hoped to copy the lucrative Chinese style.

Now, fast-forward a century. In 1838 a young German named Alfred Krupp was struggling with quality control problems at steelworks in western Germany. Like any good European of the time, he looked to England for answers. Like any bad European, he looked to steal those answers. Traveling to England under an assumed name, Krupp spent a year spying and gathering information. The trip was enormously successful, and Krupp quickly became a watchword for steel -- and artillery. Krupp guns were used in all major wars of the second half of the 19th century, and Krupp became synonymous with German militarization. Today, ThyssenKrupp is a conglomerate and one of the world's largest companies.

If Krupp was acting like modern China's industrial espionage, miners in the American West were acting a bit more like Anonymous. During the mining conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American miners and mine owners fought in the courtrooms and capitols (as well as in the streets) over unionization and the rights of workers. In Mining History Journal, Fritz Wolff calls it "Industrial Espionage: 1890s style."

In most cases, this wasn't just espionage -- this was action. Unionized miners set fires or dynamited the stamping mills of mines that used nonunion labor. Mine owners hired detectives to infiltrate the unions, then hired more detectives to guard their mines. When that didn't work, they lobbied state and territorial capitals hard, turning the police and militias against the unions.

Now, let's fast-forward again, to the 20th century. There's plenty of examples here, but let me pick one you may not have heard of: French industrial espionage against the United States in the 1980s.

To quote Pierre Marion, a former director of French intelligence:

"In economics, we are competitors, not allies. I think that even during the Cold War, getting intelligence on economic, technological, and industrial matters from a country with which you are allies is not compatible with the fact that you are allies."

In other words, just because you're allies doesn't mean you can't spy on your ally.

In 1982, Marion formed the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, or DGSE. One of its missions was (and is) industrial and commercial espionage. In 1987, the DGSE decided to target IBM, Texas Instruments and Corning. The first two companies were computing leaders, while Corning was pioneering fiber optics. The DGSE recruited employees from each of the companies who were only too happy to provide information for a little extra money. So much information came in that DGSE had to rent an apartment near Texas Instruments' office just to store the information. The espionage continued for two years until a joint CIA/FBI team cracked the effort in 1989.