First 2020 Presidential Debate: WTF Was That?

I am still trying to wrap my American brain around whatever happened last night in the context of the nationally-humiliating circus sadly billed as the first Presidential debate of 2020.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, appearing shaken, aghast even, summed it up immediately after the shameful spectacle ended: "That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck."

I am embarrassed, even ashamed, for my country, for our people. I am incensed. I am worried, indeed, frightened, for my family and loved ones, for our increasingly-fragile Republic.

I’ll admit to having been unnerved in the early moments of what became a verbal schoolyard mud-fight when Biden declared “I am the Democratic Party.” But that was a gaffe, not a hijacking.

And, as much as I believe a President deserves respect and ought not be called a “fool” or a “clown” or be told to “shut up,” honestly, how many of us watching weren’t thinking the same things?

All in all, I admired Biden’s dignity. It's astounding that he managed to retain his train of thought as Trump blustered, lied, attacked. Indeed, Biden demolished Trump’s spin that he is mentally failing.

Trump was vile. He spewed venom, lied, preened, interrupted, broke debate rules, whined, bullied, vomited insults, endorsed hate, legitimized terrorist supporters, incited violence.

He was disgraceful. He demeaned the Office.  He outlined no policies, no platform, no plans, no empathy for the plight of everyday Americans; sick, scared, unemployed, desperate.

Trump seems to have reconciled himself to not gaining a majority of voters. There was zero effort to reach beyond his base, rather, like a tinpot despot, he focused on further radicalizing them.

Indeed, he seems to have no intention of “winning” the vote. He knows he can’t. Rather, he aims to disrupt the election, contest the results, and let the newly-stacked Supreme Court bless his coup.

He displayed his full and gross narcissistic, heartless, deranged persona in rich plumage last night. Our 243-year-old Republic is at stake. Global stability is at stake. Please vote Biden.

Amy Coney Barrett: Put Her to the Test

Watching the Grifter-in-Chief and his Senate minions jamming a new Supreme Court Justice down America’s collective throat has had me thinking that Senate Democrats should just boycott the whole confirmation hearing charade.

Until today.

With the first 2020 Presidential debate mere hours away, and the future of our nation very much at stake, I’m now thinking that there is perhaps a better approach for Democrats to take in terms of the equally-pivotal Supreme Court confirmation process.

Let’s start by ruling out hearing tactics that might try to sully her character or damage her integrity.  And don’t question her Catholic faith or her “People of Praise” membership.  Indeed, Dems should acknowledge that, by all or most accounts, she’s a fine human being and a legal scholar.

So, how about plumbing her jurisprudential knowledge; seek her guidance on interpretation of various elements of the Constitution; tap her wisdom related to actual legal definitions, or her opinions on already-public matters and cases? The American people will be watching and learning.

For instance, perhaps ask her to explain the emoluments clause in the Constitution. 

Once she has, keeping things matter-of-fact, ask for her legal opinion regarding a real-life situation, such as: If a president refused to divest herself of her properties and, in fact, steered hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to her properties, would this violate the emoluments clause?

Drill a little deeper perhaps: Putting aside the obvious compromise of national security, ask: If a President declined to detach herself from a global business empire – leaving her deeply commercially-engaged with foreign governments, including with clear financial gain – would that violate the clause?

The emoluments violations list is endless, but it’s always good to mix things up, so…

Perhaps Barrett could be asked to explain the Hatch Act. You know, the 1939 law that “prohibits civil service employees in the executive branch of the federal government, except the president and vice president, from engaging in some forms of political activity.”

After she does, maybe remind her of the multiple, flagrant violations of Hatch during the recent Republican Convention and seek her legal opinion on these myriad infractions and the impact to the most basic foundation of our democracy - the rule of law – if such violations go unpunished.

Keep mixing it up.

Ask her if she might detail the Constitutionally-defined duties of the U.S. Congress to oversee the executive branch. Again, presuming the hearings will be broadcast live, such a request for Constitutional clarification will be valuable to Americans assessing the Judge’s bona fides.

Then seek the Judge’s legal opinion on the Trump administration’s repeated refusal to respond to subpoenas from the Congress.  Does she think such refusals by the executive amount to obstructions of Congressional oversight?  Obstructions of justice? If not, why not?

Shift gears.

Why not touch on the impeachment?  Ask Barrett to explain collusion. Then, borrow from the recent GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee report that lists the contacts between the Trump administration and Russians during the 2016 election and ask her opinion whether such amount to collusion.

And so on.

Again, as noted above, by all or most accounts, the Judge is a good person.  The questions above are not hypothetical. They're all related to real-world happenings, and, well, they’re all pretty blatant examples of breaking one law or another or multiple laws.

So, if Barrett answer dishonestly, she’ll expose herself as just another Trump stooge. If she answers honestly, as a person or her purported character should, then we will all get to watch Trump and his corrupt administration publicly excoriated by his own chosen Supreme Court Justice nominee.

Fun.

An Apology to Stecklow: Huawei Dissembled About Skycom, to All of Us

Two years ago, after being laid off by Huawei for questionable reasons, I published a book about my experiences with the company: Huidu - Inside Huawei.  I still stand by most of the content in the book.  

I stand by my arguments that Huawei has been treated unfairly by the U.S. Government, in some cases for duplicitous cause. I stand by my assertions that, despite its global success, Huawei is remarkably internally dysfunctional, as well as prejudiced in terms of its treatment of and general lack of respect for non-Chinese, whether employees or otherwise. 

But, I would like to extend an apology for a section of one chapter in the book, a chapter which re-captures a January 2013 blog post in which I lambast one-time Wall Street Journal, current Reuters investigative journalist Steve Stecklow. The blog post focused on Stecklow’s reporting on Huawei’s alleged circumvention of U.S. sanctions on Iran, specifically Huawei’s relationship with a Hong-Kong company called Skycom.

<Aside: I'm a tad torn on this. Not because I have come to believe that I was misled by my employer and am now in part recanting past positions, but, rather, because Stecklow gave a January 2019 presentation to an Asia Society audience in he which dedicated a snarky half-hour to deriding the blog-post section of the chapter referenced above and yet simultaneously used it to frame his self-congratulatory review of his reporting on Huawei and Skycom>.

Stecklow and I had multiple and substantive conversations related to his reporting on the Huawei-Skycom-Iran topic back in 2011-2012.  To the extent that he quoted me in his reporting, it was in the context of for-the-record guidance either developed or approved at Huawei HQ in Shenzhen, including the boilerplate statement that Skycom was an independent company with which Huawei had a normal arms-length business relationship.

The same applies to representations the Huawei D.C. Office may have made to relevant government agencies or office in the Congress.  We did not deliver such messaging blithely.  Indeed, over my eight-year tenure with Huawei, the Americans in the Washington Office took Iran and export control-related matters very seriously, and we pushed hard to have Legal and Trade Compliance leadership at HQ provide us with proof of Huawei compliance with U.S., EU, UN or other relevant sanctions.

We were skeptical, even deeply so, for instance when we learned that Huawei’s CFO had been a Board Member of Skycom in the late 2000’s. But HQ seemed to have legitimate answers to our questions and genuine in their reactions to our probes, and, well, we could not imagine that Huawei leadership would dissemble about matters as critically important to Huawei’s global business – it’s sustainability writ large – as U.S. export control and sanctions policies. 

Neither Stecklow nor the U.S. Government has yet produced – publicly - any evidence that Huawei was indeed selling or has indeed sold sensitive, sanctioned or export-controlled technology to Iran or elsewhere, directly or indirectly. If the U.S. Government had such a smoking gun, given the pattern of their behavior in all matters Huawei-related, they’d have long ago crucified the company

<Notably, Stecklow’s early reporting on Huawei providing network equipment with integrated law enforcement interfaces (not export-controlled at that time) to Iran being somehow uniquely nefarious was silly: As explained to him at the time, global network standards as approved by carriers and governments require vendors to incorporate such interfaces, for instance under the U.S. CALEA law>.

But, Stecklow’s 2011-2012 - and since - reporting on Huawei’s tangled relationships with Skycom seems to have a pretty strong basis in fact, notwithstanding Huawei’s historical denials and attestations that such entities were independent.  Indeed, his reporting has been cited as evidence in Iran sanctions-related Canadian and U.S. legal cases against Huawei’s CFO, now two-years detained in Canada pending extradition to the U.S., as well as related and broader U.S. charges against Huawei writ large.

Grossly simplified, the U.S. believes that Huawei leveraged a controlling relationship with Skycom to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Iran.  That said, the focus of U.S. criminal charges is that Huawei’s CFO and other executives pursued a conscious scheme to mislead banks about the company’s relationship with Skycom, and based on those misrepresentations, HSBC for one may have inadvertently violated sanctions or export controls by clearing funds related to illegal transactions out of Iran.

Huawei maintains that it sold its interest in Skycom in 2007 and denies any wrongdoing, including in the context of presentations or representations to banks or otherwise.

I have grown to believe that the U.S. may have a strong case.

Today, September 16, 2020, Stecklow and Reuters colleagues ran a piece titled Top Huawei executives had close ties to company at center of U.S. criminal case, prompting this blog post and my apology to Steve for my January 2013 blog post and its re-purposing in a section of a chapter in my 2018 book.

It seems that Stecklow and company have discovered that the Huawei-Skycom relationship that Huawei maintains was severed in 2007 remained alive and well in Brasil from 2007 to at least 2012. 

While Skycom was sold off to Canicula Holdings – a holding company registered in Mauritius in 2007 which the U.S. Government has suggested is another Huawei-funded shell – Stecklow reports that previously unknown Skycom shares in Huawei Brasil, dating back to 2002, were not sold until 2012 (and that was to Netherlands-registered Huawei Technologies BV).

The nugget in their reporting that stood out to me was the fact that two of Huawei’s three current CEOs – Ken Hu and Guo Ping – were directors of Huawei affiliate Hua Ying Management Co Ltd that bought 100% of Skycom in February 2007 and transferred those shares to Canicula nine months later.  Oh, of note, Huawei’s CFO now under house arrest was Hua Ying’s corporate secretary back in 2007 as well.

What bothered me when reading the article wasn’t that Huawei may or may not (I now lean towards “may") have maintained control of Skycom well beyond 2007 and, related, indirectly contributed to violations of U.S. sanctions whether through Skycom or in the context of the more convoluted path of briefings to banks.  No, my concern was much more parochial.

Over my years with the company, particularly in my early years, I had a number of opportunities to interact with both Ken and Guo, one-on-one (separately), whether on their visits to the U.S. or over lunch or coffee during my visits to Shenzhen.  Given the importance of the U.S. market, the political environment, and U.S.-China relations more broadly, such meetings were not unusual.

The thing is, I recall – perhaps incorrectly - raising Stecklow/Skycom concerns with one or another or both of them at some point in the 2011-2012 time frame.  Iran-related concerns were a big deal for us in the D.C. Office.  American emotions related to Iran are always high and any perception of Huawei wrongdoings could have been devastating.

I had no idea at the time that they had both been intimately involved with Skycom, as Reuters has now uncovered. 

And yet, I have no recollection of either of them in any way acknowledging having ever heard of Skycom when the topic was raised.  Had we in the Washington Office had access to the full Skycom and Iran histories as early as 2011-2012, we could have adjusted our posture in D.C.  At the very least, we might have avoided potentially making fools of ourselves briefing U.S. Government officials with details they may well have known to be, at best, “incomplete.”

Sadly, this pattern of behavior – compartmentalization of information essentially based on nationality – is, in my experience, the Huawei norm, not the exception.

Is it any wonder Huawei has always been and remains trust-challenged in D.C.?

Get Ready - November 3rd and the PEAD threat

Those who know me or have followed my past FB posts or comments might be familiar with my concerns expressed over the last couple of years that Trump will not leave office when he loses the election this November - mere weeks from now.

We all know that he is engaged in a wide range of shenanigans to suppress the opposition vote, most recently by efforts to cripple the U.S. Postal Service. Congressional Members of the former Republican Party (now the Cult of Trump) have unfailingly enabled him along the way.

It is unclear if any of Trump’s anti-Democratic, unconstitutional measures to disenfranchise voters will succeed in preventing the American electorate from throwing him out. Indeed, given the sheer popular disgust at what he has wreaked upon our nation and global reputation, it seems unlikely.

In earlier musings I’ve wondered about the possibility of Trump, post-November 3, declaring martial law on some or another pretext, while he challenges the veracity of the vote, based on bullshit allegations of fraud. I’ve also worried he might unleash his brownshirts again, as he did in Portland.

Worse, I’m genuinely concerned that his well-armed lunatic fringe of supporters – like the so-called Proud Boys, or their extremist right-wing anarchist allies the Boogaloo Bois, or whichever other flavor-of-the-day madfolk – might take it upon themselves to rain terrorist havoc down on our country.

I’ve chuckled at the blue-sky media musings of Trump refusing to step down only to have the Secret Service escort his sorry ass out of the White House on January 20, 2021, and, with no anointed Chief Executive, ushering in Nancy Pelosi in his stead. Yeah, right. Not.

No, Trump knows he’s fucked if he leaves. Too many State-based legal cases stacked up against him that will almost certainly produce adverse results for him and his grifter kin that cannot be undone by Federal pardon, should someone be dumb enough to contemplate such a sin.

Which leads us to what Trump has occasionally referred to as his “secret powers.” As he blathered in March of this year, “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.” Meh, with Trump, we all just assumed he was spewing more bullshit.

Whoops. Someone somewhere (Rudy? That criminal creep?) may have briefed the Idiot-in-Chief-cum-SAT-cheater on the concept of Presidential Emergency Action Documents, also known (sigh) as PEADs. Lord, what a nightmare when it comes to Trump (his supporters are still fixated on “cum”).

There’s been a lot of chatter today and in recent days about PEADs, basically presidential orders that are drafted in anticipation of a range of hypothetical, worst-case scenarios. Okay. Except, uh, no-one knows – not even the Congress – what powers a PEAD might afford a President. It’s classified.  FFS.

PEADs were born in and of the Cold War and fears of a nuclear attack that might incapacitate the country. The assumption was that a sitting President (and advisors) would have in mind the best interests of the country and citizenry and act accordingly. Trump? Oh shit.

While there are no publicly available PEADs, they are known to contain provisions allowing, for instance, suspension of the Constitution, you know, martial law, the roundup and detention of people not suspected of any crime, etc. That sort of stuff. Basically, Trump’s abuses in Portland, on steroids.

Oh, it gets worse. Under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, the President can declare a national emergency just by signing a proclamation. Trump? Oh. Shit. Again. And this, now, is how I anticipate he will address his loss in November, or, before, perhaps suspending the elections altogether.

I’ve not been a fan of the gloom-and-doom types predicting a post-election civil war. We’re bigger and better than that, I’ve thought. Well my American friends, in whatever fashion, we cannot let any PEAD-inspired abomination occur. It would be the end of our nation. Stand up.

Forbes/Calhoun: Five Points to Save Huawei? Forgot Localization

On July 23, 2020, George Calhoun, who I do not know but who seems to have a remarkable pedigree, had a thoughtful contribution published by Forbes titled “How Huawei Could Save Itself: A Five-Point Plan” (linked).  Good ideas.  But not enough.

(Full disclosure: I worked for Huawei from 2010-2018. I owe them nothing and, frankly, in light of how I was mistreated in my final years, I have zero reason to stump for them.  However, I remain engaged in terms of the broader geo-economic and geopolitical policy issues that the Huawei conundrum presents).

George opened with an apt disclaimer: “I have no inside information related to Huawei. I have never done personal business with them, and I have not spent much time in China. I do have a background in the wireless industry, but my proposals here are generic to modern business practice, and/or a sort of common sense, I think. Which is not to say that any of them have a practical chance of being adopted.”

Well said.  And his thoughts are valuable.  Huawei, however, is unique.

The first of the five points suggests that Huawei should follow and be assessed to its performance according to globally-accepted financial/accounting standards.  Now, as I used to parrot when I was with Huawei, George notes that “Huawei currently provides financial statements that comply with international accounting standards (IFRS), audited by KPMG…” He goes on to point out, however, that Chinese companies listed on American exchanges don’t follow the requirement to be reviewed by the Sarbanes-Oxley spawned Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) since the Chinese government has blocked the PCAOB from exercising its function for Chinese companies.  Now, Huawei is not listed in the U.S., but George suggests “Huawei should request the Chinese government for a waiver to allow PCAOB to review KPMG’s audit, and, they should also invite an additional audit review by a different firm – not KPMG, and not based in China, and, they should also publicize the waiver request, even in the face of Beijing’s likely disapproval, and actively lobby the government to permit it." Strong idea.  Not enough though.  And, the current Huawei wouldn’t touch it – they are beyond adamant about not going sideways of the Chinese Government or the CPC.

For his second point, George suggests that Huawei should ask to have its credit rated by the three leading global rating agencies, according to global standards, and not as is the current practice or relying on credit ratings from suspect Chinese credit rating agencies, which operate by credit ratings standards that are not equivalent to global standards.  George notes that credit ratings performed by global firms like S&P and Moody’s would amount to “another form of “audit…which is in some ways more demanding and more substantive than an accounting audit, because it also considers the nature and viability of the company’s strategy and the competitive market environment.”   He’s correct.  This would be an easy thing for Huawei to do and would certainly help their global reputation.  It’s been recommended before.  It’s unclear why Huawei has balked.

George’s third recommendation, in my opinion, falls quite flat.  He points out that “The number one stated concern of most Western governments is the possibility that information passing through Huawei’s networks could be accessed by the Chinese government.”  He then cites unspecified Chinese law that says the company like all Chinese companies are subject to “forced cooperation with the Chinese military intelligence service.”  This is a constant canard of the U.S. Government, despite the fact that Chinese, international and American lawyers have all pointed out that no such law exists in terms of outside-China data and information.  In any event, why would they publish a law in a country lacking a history of the rule of law?  That question is what undermines George’s third recommendation, e.g. that “Huawei should construct its own firewall…to interpose between its equipment and the Chinese security apparatus and block the transfer of user information. This firewall should be open to inspection and validation by outside authorities.”  This is a pipe dream, absent fundamental overhaul (foreshadowing).

Point number four has George proposing that Huawei jettison it’s historical, militaristic “Wolf Culture.” George mistakenly opens suggesting that “Huawei sprang from a military origin.”  This is simply untrue, but he has a point that the culture encouraged by Huawei Founder and still CEO Ren Zhengfei – a former PLA civil, not telecommunications, engineer - is indeed militaristic, rhetorically.  Ren still speaks in riddles and analogies that sometimes rely on his military past (and just as often on his love for nature), but, having spent enough time in the organization, albeit as a Westerner, I can say that the “Wolf Culture” has really just become proud company lore at this point.  All of that said, should Huawei want a cheap and easy PR campaign, they could do as he suggests and “euthanize the wolf culture,” but died-in-the-wool Huawei adversaries in the West wouldn’t buy it.

George’s point number five is one focused on something that has always been a source of consternation in the West: “Who Owns Huawei?” George says “The company says that Huawei is employee-owned. 100,000 happy capitalists. Probably a lot of millionaires. Just like Microsoft, more or less…”  I must admit, that sums up what we were saying when I was with Huawei. And, he points out that in the West the prevailing thought is “that Huawei is either owned or controlled by the CCP.”  Of course, there’s no proof offered for this assumption on the part of Western authorities other than “they’re Chinese so they must be.”  George offers an “interim” recommendation: “Huawei should invite an international team of business, legal and corporate governance experts to review the current structure in detail, with full access to all the appropriate information, charged with producing a thorough and honest report of the current state of affairs.”  Great idea.  Huawei has invited same on multiple occasions, but never followed through.  And, the U.S., for instance, has offered the same as well, and, yet, in 2012 instead sent a gaggle of ham-handed Congressfolk and staff which ultimately released a pre-cooked report that confirmed their largely groundless preconceptions.

George includes a sixth bonus point, what he calls “Laissez-Faire.”  He says that “Huawei’s relationship with the Chinese government has to change. The company needs to stand up to the Chinese authorities and assert its commercial independence from the state’s geopolitical agenda.”  He concludes: “It is time for Huawei to become what they say they are. Stand up now. If we take the company’s self-characterization at face value, as they want us to, true to its outward clothing as a private company with a no controlling government ties – then show us! Take the heat. The world will rally to you.”

Now, while I greatly appreciate those heartfelt sentiments, and I truly believe that George’s entire article is reasonable, rational and hopeful, as I said before, Huawei is simply not going to go sideways of the Chinese Government, at least not in China.

Which leads me back to George’s point number five where he also said: “Huawei should consider how to restructure itself so as to bring its ownership arrangements into line with a more comprehensible and transparent structure. Whether this involves creating a public company, or a hybrid with multiple share classes, or a partnership, or a state-owned enterprise...”

Yes.

Over my eight years at Huawei, I spent better than half of them advocating for the company to address its Western nation challenges through organizational change.  Specifically, I repeatedly recommended that the company should localize.  And I mean truly localize.  The company has a mantra that talks about 75% localization.  It’s a crock. A) A lot of those folks are Green Card holders from China, and B) Local executives are almost universally not empowered to make decisions or otherwise run the business.  And, it’s not hard for local stakeholders – including Government – to recognize this, which makes Huawei more suspect, which reinforces pretty much all of the negative assumptions about the company.

Further, I recommended that the company should make a harmless investment in the U.S. that would require it to go before the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) – A who’s who of sixteen U.S. Federal Government agencies charged with assessing foreign acquisitions for potential national security threats.  Further, I suggested the company acquiesce to whatever the Committee might demand to approve a transaction.  Yet further, I suggested Huawei and the U.S. Government could use the process to birth a truly independent, transparent American subsidiary of the company, including with select Government-appointed Board Members, and other Americans empowered to make real decisions, and appropriate security assurance mechanisms established and monitored to ensure the integrity of American networks and data.

So, in sum, I think George's recommendations were great, with a couple of exceptions in terms of Huawei going domestically (China) sideways of the PRC or CPC, and with the addition of perhaps the most critical requirement – empowering non-Chinese in non-Chinese markets to manage the business and oversee the security of non-Chinese critical infrastructure.

State Paper Promoting Perilous China Decoupling Rehashes Huawei

China-based Huawei, the world’s leading telecommunications equipment vender, has long suffered strident U.S. Government opposition, both within the U.S. and, increasingly, over the last decade, extraterritorially. The U.S. Government believes that Huawei is effectively or actually an arm of the PRC/CCP and thus presents a national security threat, both in terms of facilitating espionage and in the context of China’s potential dominance of the global information and communications technology industry. 

No credible public proof of the U.S. allegations exists.  Huawei denies them.

On May 22, 2020, the State Department’s Office of the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security released Volume 1, Number 8 in its series of Arms Control and International Security Papers, titled U.S. National Security Export Controls and Huawei: The Strategic Context in Three Framings, authored by Assistant Secretary Christopher Ford, a Trump political appointee.  Link to the paper: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/T-Paper-Series-U.S.-National-Security-Export-Controls-and-Huawei.pdf.

The paper purports to discuss “recent U.S. moves to restrict transfers of cutting-edge U.S. technology to Chinese technology company Huawei, explaining these steps and placing them in the strategic context of a great power competition with the People's Republic of China (PRC) brought on by Beijing's geopolitical revisionism, exploitation of such firms to steal and divert foreign technology to support the Chinese military, abuses of human rights in China itself, and employment of companies such as Huawei as tools of strategic influence.”

The “recent U.S. moves” referenced in the paper are changes to the U.S. export control regime – and specifically the so-called “Entity List” - which allow for more broad reaching restrictions and license requirements for U.S. firms that might do or contemplate doing business with foreign firms, with Huawei as an example.   At this point, not only can U.S. firms not export (without license) components to Huawei, they are restricted from selling Huawei the gear currently required by the Chinese company to produce, for instance, higher-end semiconductors.

That said, in reality, the paper’s references to Huawei are largely limited to repetition of never-proven accusations, and reiteration of Huawei’s Iran sanctions busting-related sins (the latter which is legitimate in terms of charges that the company engaged in sales of controlled technology).  Oddly, inexplicably, Huawei’s Iran debacle is conflated with utterly unrelated allegations of intellectual property theft, spotlighting “source code and user manuals for Internet routers,” a clear reference to an over twenty-year old incident involving Cisco.  There is also reference to charges filed this February related to undetailed but alleged intellectual property “misappropriation” from six U.S. technology firms.

The paper’s true focus is on China, not Huawei. 

China’s history of intellectual property theft is broadly discussed, with commentary also looking forward in the context of the “Made in China 2025” initiative, characterized as epitomizing “the PRC’s drive to seize a dominant share of global high technology markets as soon as possible;” the paper expresses great competitive concern for China’s strategy of “military-civil fusion” (these are legitimate concerns).  There is also a good deal of detail and condemnation of  China’s pattern of human rights violations featured in the treatise – “Huawei and it’s siblings” are described as “handmaidens…of oppression” via provision of surveillance technology, notably similar to elements of the “smart cities” technologies and capabilities being developed and marketed by U.S. and other Western firms.

Somewhat diluting its impact, there is an odd pretentiousness to the paper, in terms of its broad and perhaps not-always-necessary use of ill-fit or over-thought or just gratuitous analogies and metaphors.  The slightly tortured paragraph on the second page attempting to analogize Chinese landscape painting to the so-called Huawei Policy Landscape is a reach, at best.  The reference to Voltaire and 18th century Prussia and its army on page three is gratuitous.  And, given China’s rich and long history, page four’s cherry-picking of the fourth century BCE legal framework that allowed for the establishment of the Qin Dynasty as some sort of scene-setter for today’s environment in China seems just filler.

Finally, in terms of over-the-top analogies, the Conclusion section’s references to “Thucydides’ rendering of Pericles famous funeral oration for Athens’ early casualties in the Peloponnesian War” and “Venetian officials who in 1745 actually dispatched an assassination team to pursue two local glass-blowers who had taken the lucrative secrets of their trade abroad” approach the definition of pretentious.

Yet, notwithstanding the misleading title, the parroting of tired or undetailed allegations about Huawei, the all-over-the-place analogies and metaphors, there is value to the paper.  On the one hand, it sets the stage for the more recent June 15 Commerce Department announcement and clarification that Huawei’s inclusion on the Entity List does not preclude American companies from engaging with Huawei in 5G standards development.  It is the normal course of business in the telecommunications industry for standards to be developed globally and given Huawei’s 5G leadership, not allowing American firms to collaborate in 5G and related standards bodies including Huawei would severely disadvantage those companies.  The Commerce ruling is welcome.

But, the announcement should not be interpreted as a loosening of the U.S. stranglehold on Huawei.  It is not.  It is 100% self-serving on the part of the U.S., and very necessary for U.S. industry to remain viable in the 5G space.

On the other hand, and perhaps the most important takeaway from a macro perspective, the paper highlights that the U.S. seems determined to decouple from China, in the technology arena, and, it would also seem, more broadly.  However one might feel about China, from an economic, political, ideological, trade, rule-of-law, human rights or other perspective, decoupling is a dangerous prospect.  America has retreated from our global leadership position in recent years, which is worrisome.  Meanwhile, China’s profile and influence has grown, which is yet more worrisome.  Whether we like it or not, we must accept that China has emerged as a peer of sorts on the global stage, clearly not in terms of democratic values, but certainly from a political and economic perspective. 

On the technology front, we should – we must – recognize that the information and communications technology industry has become global, interdependent, borderless.  Supply chains and networks coexist and overlap.  There is no putting this genie back in its bottle.  While we have bits and pieces, and primarily at the high end, the U.S. cannot hope to midwife a full-blown telecommunications industry.  China, however, has the financial, human and technological resources to verticalize their own.  This is not in our economic or national security interest.  Indeed, our goal should be to remain integrated so that technology solutions and products remain intrinsically global.  It is arrogance to believe that we can go it without China.  Strategic re-coupling should be the path we follow, and urgently.