The Chinese Communist Party dictatorship in Beijing is considering punishing two private companies, Nokia and Ericsson, if the European Union bars Huawei Technologies from 5G networks in the EU.
The United States and Britain, the latter in a recent dramatic volte-face, have already decided to exclude Huawei on the grounds that the Chinese company is creating a global electronic spy system for the most powerful tyranny on Earth. It seems to be a good idea to avoid that.
Wireless equipment for 5G will be sprinkled across the landscape like poppy seeds on a bagel. It will be everywhere, on towers and rooftops, on every hill, in millions of offices and hotels, in individual rooms, and even in your fridge as the Internet of Things becomes a reality.
It will function 100 times faster than the 4G networks we currently use, but while all that extra speed and efficiency will serve us wherever we are and whatever we are doing, equipment from a manufacturer controlled and directed by Beijing would at the same time sluice billions of pieces of information to a strategic rival bent on ousting America as the world’s most powerful nation.
Information from 5G networks will document our habits, activities, and travel, our purchases and contacts; it will engulf all communication, including that by the government, massively increasing national vulnerability in times of crisis if it is in the wrong hands. It would give an enemy that controls it the power to disrupt and produce chaos. And China, despite decades of happy talk, does not have our interests at heart.
As Sen. Marco Rubio noted last year, “The Communist Chinese government poses the greatest long-term threat to America’s national and economic security, and the U.S. must be vigilant in preventing Chinese state-directed telecoms companies, like Huawei … from undermining and endangering America’s 5G networks.”
Beijing, naturally, denies that it has any intention to spy or abuse its position. But its lack of credibility on matters of national security and human rights is everywhere apparent. It has just broken its international promises and betrayed Hong Kong to tighten its grip on that once-free territory. It lied and concealed the coronavirus and inflicted a deadly pandemic on the world, destroying lives and hammering economies everywhere. And in a recent interview that has to be seen to be believed, the Chinese ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, flailed absurdly in denials and obfuscation when presented with a video of Uighurs, blindfolded and with their heads shaven, cowering on the ground and then herded by Chinese police onto trains for shipment to reeducation camps.
In its clumsiness, China’s dishonesty does more to reveal its malevolence than to conceal it. So does its threatened retaliation against the two Scandinavian electronics companies. For it demonstrates yet again that China makes no distinction between people and corporations on the one hand and states on the other. If Beijing dislikes a state’s decision, it’s fine punishing a private corporation. Its threat against Nokia and Ericsson underscores the very reason why Huawei needs to be excluded from the 5G networks of free nations. Beijing is essentially confirming that an electronics company (Huawei) is a sock puppet for its government (the CCP). Washington and Beijing agree entirely on the nature of communist rule, but what they both say comes in the form of an accusation from America and an admission from China.
“L’état, c’est Mao,” changes one letter of the absolutist phrase apocryphally attributed to Louis XIV, and it is the first principle of Chinese communism. Chairman Mao Zedong is long gone, but in the decades since the Great Helmsman sailed off to the lake of fire, his political descendants have kept his idea that nothing may be permitted beyond the scope of central government control.
Beijing assumes that the same rule applies in the West and that any action or decision that militates against Chinese interests must, ipso facto, have been ordered by a hostile central government. When Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, was detained by Canadian authorities for extradition to the U.S. to be prosecuted for circumventing sanctions on Iran, the Chinese foreign ministry summoned Ambassador Terry Branstad to protest. It does not seem possible to Beijing, because it makes it impossible domestically, that a prosecutor might act independently of a political overseer and simply according to the evidence and the law.
A growing rival power keeps showing us and telling us that it assumes state actors meddle in every aspect of private and commercial life. It’s a good idea to take it at its word. The best case for excluding Huawei from 5G is being made by its master, Beijing.
