When it comes to China and our security, Britain is behind the curve
How much does your mobile phone bill come to each month? Whatever it is, it would be higher in America. One reason is that the US and the UK treat the Chinese telecoms company, Huawei, very differently.
Huawei, whose chief financial officer was arrested in Canada this week on suspicion of US sanctions-busting, made sales of $87 billion last year. Yet its US growth has been strictly limited because Washington sees it as an avenue for Chinese espionage. In the UK, we’re more relaxed. Our reward is a much cheaper service. But we’re now rather belatedly starting to consider whether there is a hidden cost.
Alex Younger, the head of MI6, wondered aloud this week whether it’s really a good idea to have Chinese equipment hardwired into the country’s critical infrastructure. Three of the UK’S biggest telecoms companies are building Huawei hardware into their 5G networks, whereas BT has started stripping it out of its core 4G network.
When it comes to national security and China, the UK is late to the game. I recently wrote about how our own universities happily hire Chinese military scientists to pursue research funded by government grants. In the US, Australia and New Zealand, growing Chinese influence is a live political issue. We are behind the curve because we still seem to think that unthreatening activities like selling smartphones and writing physics papers are somehow totally separate from Beijing’s development of advanced cyber and ballistic military capabilities. Huawei is employee-owned and says it doesn’t spy. Yet in China, there’s no line between private and state, civilian and military.
Admitting this and dealing with the consequences will come with a cost. Huawei’s equipment operates very well, its customer service is attentive and it’s cheap. The UK approach is to strip down everything the company makes in a lab and inspect it for potential espionage capacity before it gets used. But this is hardly a failsafe method.
“Global Britain” is fine, but let’s not stand for a foolhardy ignorance of an obvious risk. China is a rising superpower and not a friendly one.