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.
