I like my Huawei phone. I’m looking forward to the new Mate 60Pro. It’s launch means the US-led sanctions aiming to crush Huawei, with New Zealand as a fast follower, have completely failed to set back Chinese technology.
The United States’ approach to ‘extreme competition’ which is how it describes its relation to China, is to crush its opposition. China had set an objective of achieving technological excellence, and the US has set out to ensure it fails. One particular target was Huawei, an employee-owned technology company which in 2018 was leading the world in cellphone sales and 5G technology.
Spark in New Zealand wanted to use Huawei in its 5G radio-access-network (RAN) in 2018. It was blocked by the GCSB in November 2018.
In a statement to the New Zealand Stock Exchange, Spark said it had notified the GCSB of its intention to use Huawei equipment in its 5G radio access network (RAN). “The Director-General has informed Spark today that he considers Spark’s proposal to use Huawei 5G equipment in Spark’s planned 5G RAN would, if implemented, raise significant national security risks,” Spark said. This means Spark cannot implement or give effect to its proposal to use Huawei RAN equipment in its planned 5G network.”
The Director-General of the GCSB, Andrew Hampton, told a Parliamentary Select Committee in February 2019 that the decision to refuse Huawei had been his alone and not the result of any outside influence.
“I would like to assure the committee that in making my decision, at no point was I under direct or indirect pressure from any party. My decision was independent from ministers and while we share intelligence with Five Eyes partners, there was no pressure, requests or demands made by partners, either publicly or privately, to ban any vendor.”
However that may be, in December 2018 the Sydney Morning Herald reported on a July 17 2018 Nova Scotia meeting of 5Eyes chiefs where..
..the conversation returned to a debate that began well before this annual meeting and would run long after it: should the agencies go public with their concerns about China?
In the months that followed that July 17 dinner, an unprecedented campaign has been waged by those present – Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – to block Chinese tech giant Huawei from supplying equipment for their next-generation wireless networks.
This increasingly muscular posture towards Beijing culminated in last week’s arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in Vancouver, over alleged breaches of US sanctions with Iran. Meng, the daughter of the Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei, was granted bail on Wednesday ahead of efforts to extradite her to the US.
Since that July meeting there has been a series of rare public speeches by intelligence chiefs and a coordinated effort on banning Huawei from 5G networks. It began with one of Malcolm Turnbull’s last acts as Prime Minister.
The Sunday before he was deposed (in August 2018) Turnbull rang the US President Donald Trump to tell him of Australia’s decision to exclude Huawei and China’s second largest telecommunications equipment maker ZTE from the 5G rollout.
This decisions have been followed up in the US by an increasing range of sanctions designed to prevent Chinese firms accessing the latest chip technology. The Huawei Mate60 was launched on the final day of the visit of US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, whose department is responsible for administering the sanctions, and was an instant sensation on Chinese social media and sold out rapidly.
The key thing about the phone is that its components, including its 7nM central processor, are all China made. Just as with the sanctions from hell that were supposed to crush the Russian economy, the sanctions on Huawei are turning Chinese technology into an autarky. It is the US companies that previously supplied components that will feel the heat.
There are more than a few lessons to be drawn from this story. The 5Eyes agencies are certainly running co-ordinated media campaigns on the “China threat.” Smith’s 4th Law of Politics is apposite – ‘don’t believe everything you hear.’ More on that later.
Sanctions do not work. On the one hand they punish the wrong people, on the other hand the blowback is karmic. Calls for Biden to go are growing, Europe will face a hard winter, and the Global South is on the move.
Western technology is not all it is cracked up to be. The promise of AUKUS Pillar 2 may prove to be illusory.
I can’t wait for my new phone.
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