That’s actually a really good explainer, (complete with Chinese legal justifications, woohoo! 
), but yeah, the bad actor is still generally the *service provider taking advantage of their access rather than the eSIM itself.
*(which is often Chinese-owned even in other countries)
Another report here:
Chinese-made Zbtlink routers have backdoor, researchers say - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinese-made-zbtlink-routers-have-backdoor-researchers-say-2026-08-05/
The previously unreported backdoor, dubbed “Endlessdoors” by the researchers who discovered it, ships in multiple models of routers manufactured and sold by Zbtlink around the world under both the Zbtlink and Wiflyer brand names, according to Jacob Baines, the chief technology officer at VulnCheck who found the backdoor.
[..]
The backdoor discovered by Baines automatically communicates to a specific IP address and Chinese-registered domain every 35 seconds, Baines said in a blog post on the company’s website. Whoever controls those domains could take control of the router and potentially use it to access other devices on the same network, he said.
The only surprise is that they aren’t all so blatant - literally every Chinese tech product has some kind of spy mechanism built in.
And now that I’m properly in Taiwan I seem to be tripping over them left and right, just yesterday talked to somebody that couldn’t get to a website I’d sent them, they were behind a half-decent VPN and it was blocking their browser from visiting a Chinese SSL certificate validation service. They’d apparently installed a plugin for the browser which was happily injecting spyware on every web page they viewed.
The concerning thing was, this was a C-suite exec for a company big enough to afford decent internal IT, and he hadn’t installed any plugins for months. So if it weren’t for the VPN he’d picked up for travelling he’d have been spied on for who knows how much longer.
I don’t know if it was targetted attack for corporate espionage purposes, a supply-chain attack, an inside job, or if he just clicked something he shouldn’t have, but their IT clearly wasn’t doing a very good job. 
I really wanted to figure out a way to determine if an eSIM is actually the product of a Chinese telecom operator, so that thread was kind of my process of figuring it out.
I think it comes down to 3 points:
If the eSIM claims it can allow you to swap between operators, it’s likely a Chinese telecom product. Switching between operators is usually only achievable while data roaming, and it would mean the eSIM could be issued by a Hong Kong or China based telecom and is just data roaming in your target country.
If you can find out the ICCID for your eSIM before purchase, after the initial two numbers 89, it would be followed by the country code the place that issued the eSIM. So for native Japan eSIM, ICCID would be 8981, for Korea it would be 8982.
Look through the instruction to activate the eSIM product before purchase. If it instructs you to turn on data roaming, that could also be a sign that it’s a Chinese telecom product. Instructions for activating povo (KDDI) eSIM in Japan did not include turning on data roaming.
I can find that number for the physical sim which is in my phone. But for the installed eSIM I only see an IMEI2 number. Where to look further? (iPhone)