Major telecommunications companies are shifting away from tech giant Huawei as the coronavirus pandemic deepens global suspicion of companies backed by the Chinese Communist Party.
“We’ve come through this crucible,” said retired Air Force Gen. Rob Spalding, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, while discussing how private companies are changing behavior in light of U.S. government warnings. “It was after a lot of coaxing by the State Department and the National Security Council that have been hammering this.”
The combination of public anger and private lobbying has paid dividends for U.S. officials who have struggled previously to persuade allied governments to ban Huawei from their next-generation wireless technology infrastructure. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has conducted a two-year campaign to drive Huawei from the 5G systems of democracies with uneven results, but the recent trend of private sector victories has allowed him to argue that the wind is at his back.
“The tide is turning against Huawei as citizens around the world are waking up to the danger of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state,” Pompeo said in a Wednesday statement. “The more countries, companies, and citizens ask whom they should trust with their most sensitive data, the more obvious the answer becomes: Not the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state.”
Pompeo regards Huawei as a platform for Beijing’s spy agencies, in keeping with a bipartisan consensus that the telecommunications company allows Chinese intelligence officers to use the technology for surveillance purposes.
“We know that if you go to the top floors of Huawei’s commercial building inside of China, that there are members of the Chinese security apparatus working there,” he said Thursday during the Germany Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum. “They own the joint, right? They don’t need a key. They own the infrastructure. And if that information passes across that infrastructure and Huawei has the capacity to capture it — the most egregious privacy violations in the world — that information will be in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”
But the debate over Huawei remains active in the governments of some of the closest U.S. military allies. Pompeo’s exuberant statement Wednesday put a spotlight on several nations, most of which are in Eastern Europe, that “are only allowing trusted vendors in their 5G networks.” The statement then shifted attention to an array of companies that Pompeo deems praiseworthy in countries that have not banned Huawei.
“Some of the largest telecom companies around the globe are also becoming ‘Clean Telcos,’” Pompeo said. That list featured individual companies from France, India, South Korea, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom. “The momentum in favor of secure 5G is building.”
The statement is an apparent effort to urge those Western European and Indo-Pacific nations to follow the example of the other nations.
“‘Clean country’ and ‘Clean Telcos’ are a little bit different,” one allied government official following these issues said. “I think one of the purposes of this statement is promoting how they are doing great … and the second thing is to encourage other countries, ‘Oh, you should be a clean country.’ So that’s messaging.”
Spalding, who worked at the National Security Council during President Trump’s first year in office, cautioned that American officials and U.S. allies will need to be wary of Chinese espionage due to Huawei’s ongoing involvement in setting 5G standards.
“Huawei is done, but that doesn’t mean everybody is safe,” he said. “They’d much rather have Huawei built, right, because they get business, and they get access … just because Huawei doesn’t build it doesn’t mean that they can’t figure out how to get into it.”
