Don’t let the spooks decide our trade policy with China
There’s no evidence China uses Huawei to spy. The US is just trying to bully us to do its bidding, writes Josie Pagani.
All big states spy. They also attempt to charm politicians, promote their culture and influence other countries. So we can make a good guess that China is impatient that Huawei is being sidelined from Western telecommunications systems.
Huawei has close ties to senior Chinese panjandrums, it’s true. The Justice Department in the United States is taking the company to court over charges of fraud, and violating sanctions against Iran. But so far no-one has presented evidence that it is spying on behalf of its government.
Britain is suspicious of Huawei but, instead of banning the company, the United Kingdom has for years been testing its hardware and its software at a lab at its National Cyber Security Centre. An official from the agency said in February that it had never found any evidence it was being used to spy.
It did find Huawei’s software has exceptionally weak security but, if that was grounds to ban tech companies, Microsoft’s Windows would never have been allowed on most of the world’s desktop computers.
The UK proposes to manage that risk by circumscribing what Huawei can provide, and keeping it away from sensitive information. It won’t lock the company out of 5G fast wireless technology altogether.
We don’t know for sure that Huawei hasn’t been asked to build backdoors into its products on behalf of the Chinese government. We do know it hasn’t been caught. It was France, not China, that in living memory bombed New Zealand in a grotesque act of terrorism. No-one talks about banning Alcatel or Transdev.
The French pay for Alliance Francaise to project French culture. Germans have the Goethe Institute. The American taxpayer has bought me more than a couple of lunches when I worked for the Helen Clark government. While I would like to believe their motivation was my sparkling wit and geo-strategic insight, they may have been more interested in my political and media connections.
Foreign posts are supposed to influencepeddle. And all big countries spy. New Zealand collaborates with the US, UK, Australia and, uh, Canada (that paragon of keeping government influence out of business – not) in a global network called Five Eyes.
Our part in the network is two giant aerials, at Waihopai and Tangimoana. These are used to spy on trading partners such as Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. The algorithm also, by the way, intercepts your email, Instagram, Facebook and Gmail messages and filters them to find nutcases.
In return for providing our partners with daily terabytes of downloads, we get valuable security information about potential terrorists. If we were not part of the network, there would be a realistic risk of extremists using New Zealand as an easy entry point to Australia, where we have repeatedly seen lunatics cutting throats and shooting people.
Not being part of Five Eyes has risks, but so too does sabotaging our trade with China.
I have no doubt that China does spy. We can’t know for sure whether it is using Huawei to spy. But what is really happening is that we are being used as pawns in the US trade war with China. Huawei is a soft target. The US says to China: ‘‘Play by our rules, because it would be a shame if something bad were to happen to Huawei.’’ Then they lean on us: ‘‘Ban Huawei or we will kick you out of Five Eyes.’’
So the right response is not to roll over when we hear our masters’ voice, but to weigh the relevant advantage. The Trump administration’s attempt to blow up the global trading system, reintroduce tariffs and use bogus security concerns (apparently our steel and aluminium exports are a security threat) as an excuse should embolden us to say, ‘‘Thanks for your advice, but we’ll make our own decisions on what to do about Huawei.’’
The last time the New Zealand SIS publicly did what the US and UK told them to do about China was in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War. Our spies were instructed to keep an eye on my communist uncle, the New Zealander Rewi Alley (in fact my grandmother’s first cousin, but I always knew Rewi as my great-uncle).
My mother remembers Rewi visiting in the late 1950s and meeting Prime Minister Walter Nash, who defied the advice of the SIS and invited Rewi to tea. They got on famously, and Nash wrote to Rewi’s brother promising to do all he could to expedite New Zealand’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China.
Which is exactly what the next Labour government did under Norm Kirk. Kirk’s government formally recognised China, and formal relations with New Zealand began. All of this laid the groundwork for China’s first freetrade agreement. It’s no accident it happened to be with us.
Frankly, I’d rather Five Eyes stormed off and took their spy domes with them, and we keep our biggest trading partner onside. We don’t have to agree to use trade as a diplomatic weapon, just because President Trump does.
Josie Pagani is on the Rewi Alley Trust, and the Trade for All Advisory Board.