Texarkana Gazette

At the epicenter of the US-China 5G struggle

- Trudy Rubin

Despite the truce in the United States-China trade wars, the tech wars between Washington and Beijing are intensifyi­ng. Most immediate is the struggle over who will build the new, superfast fifth-generation, or 5G, cellular networks that will revolution­ize the way we live by empowering the use of artificial intelligen­ce and other cutting-edge technologi­es.

Huawei is a name you should know.

As China’s leading telecoms company, Huawei is the global leader in the race to build 5G networks, followed by the European firms Nokia and Ericsson. However, Washington is trying to ban Huawei from doing business with the U.S. or our allies for fear that the Chinese military could insert a “backdoor” into its equipment for spying.

Yet, sad to say, the United States has no telecoms giant to compete with Huawei. This is as important a part of the story as the curbs on the tech company.

In November, I traveled to the high-tech city of Shenzhen to visit Huawei, see its products, and talk to senior officials — and sense the reaction to a U.S. ban.

The Huawei campus is an immense, sprawling set of low-slung buildings and extensive greenery, bustling with cranes constructi­ng new facilities. I was ushered into an ornate building with marble floors, a ceiling three stories high and an Italianate sculpture of three nymphs arm in arm on a lobby fountain.

Then I was wrenched into the 21st-century tech wars as I whisked around the Galileo showroom and got briefed on Huawei’s ongoing 5G rollout in China. Xi Jinping has pushed for a speedy rollout as part of his pledge to make China the dominant player in 10 key technologi­es by 2025.

One statistic that caught my attention: Huawei spent $15.3 billion on research and developmen­t in 2018, beating Microsoft, Apple and Intel, and helping to give it an edge in 5G technology. Despite the Trump administra­tion’s ban, the company’s 2019 revenues surged 18% (no doubt in part because Huawei phones, also banned in the United States, have such a crisp, gorgeous screen at half or one-fourth the price of an iPhone).

I asked Catherine Chen, a senior vice president and Huawei board member, what would happen if President Donald Trump eliminates all loopholes in the ban on Huawei purchases of U.S. components. “I don’t think it will have much of an impact on us, especially not for 5G,” she said. (U.S. tech experts say Huawei has stockpiled at least a year’s worth of such components and Huawei is also working on developing its own components.)

Chen was also optimistic about Huawei’s global prospects. (It now operates in 170 countries with 194,000 workers.) I asked about future problems for Huawei phones, if they are denied access by the ban to the Google ecosystem of apps, such as Google Maps. This would seriously impact exports.

Chen said the company is seeking foreign partners and app developers to work on an alternativ­e ecosystem to Google’s. Just since my visit, the Dutch digital mapping company TomTom closed a deal with Huawei.

Not surprising­ly, Chen was at the ready when I asked about China’s 2017 national security law that requires Chinese companies to cooperate with the government and army.

“I really like this question,” she said. She pulled out materials explaining Huawei’s structure as a private shareholdi­ng company, and insisted that the 2017 law “doesn’t require any Chinese company to install backdoors or collect intelligen­ce.”

Yet every U.S. expert on digital security I’ve asked is skeptical about this answer, given Xi Jinping’s focus on top-down controls over everything. “The security issue is real,” says Adam Segal, director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The administra­tion is right to ban it from U.S. networks. The question is how do you weigh the security concerns vs. the costs.”

If the United States wants to ban suspect Chinese technology, it must have a robust strategy to provide competitio­n. “It’s not enough to hobble Huawei,” says Segal. “We have to start to think differentl­y.”

That would require strong, focused White House leadership on funding basic research, encouragin­g private-public collaborat­ion and keeping talented foreign Ph.D. scholars in this country.

There are government and think tank studies that lay out the way forward, and even bipartisan bills pending in Congress. Yet there is still no Sputnik moment, no Manhattan Project for 5G, let alone for 6G. Much easier just to denounce China.

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