Just two months ago, a quick search on Google for the Chinese IT company, Huawei, could lead us to hundreds of stories about its latest deals and projects spread in about 140 countries, especially when it became
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in the second quarter of last year the second largest. A company producing smartphones in the world after its Korean counterpart Samsung, surpassing the American company Apple for the first time in seven years, to occupy the latter place for a brief and unprecedented period in the aforementioned quarter, however, similar research today, after what happened during The months of last December and January this year lead us mostly to lengthy news about court aids, growing Western concerns about Huawei’s technological control, and finally the accusations that rained down on the company’s head in the United States.
The last of
these accusations are announced by the US Department of
Justice, when he
held a
press conference attended by the
President of the
Federal Investigation (FBI) "Christopher Ray" accused the "Huawei" stealing US technology and the
theft of
commercial secrets of
which circumvent the banks to circumvent the sanctions against Iran, and said
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Acting Prosecutor "Matthew Whitaker" during the
conference that «Huawei crimes dating back to at least ten years and include the
top of the
head of the
company», where indicated
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"Whitaker" to attempt a Huawei engineers steal information about robot the American company "T -
Mobile" Besnaath Including the theft of a small piece of it in 2014, in addition to denying its links to the "Skycom" company, which it already owns in Hong Kong, through which it entered the Iranian market and "misleading American banks" that dealt with it in this regard.
The recent "Skycom" case and the file for breaching sanctions on Iran - which the Trump administration decided to reopen, striking the Vienna International Agreement 2015 - was the focus of rapid events, which reached the point of Canada issuing an arrest warrant for Huawei’s financial director, Meng Wanzo, who is the daughter of the founder The company and one of the board members of "Skycom", as it turned out, upon a request from Washington in preparation for her trial there, and she was already arrested on December 1 in the Canadian city of "Vancouver", before her release with the determination of her residency and her obligation to wear an electronic device on one of her feet to remain under observation While the procedures for her deportation to America remain under negotiation between the two parties.
Of course, the doors of the battle did not open in just two months. Intertwined political, economic and technological events have accumulated for years during which the American welcome to the Chinese capitalist experiment and the quiet integration of China into the global system turned into an apprehension of Beijing and its companies' manipulating the market and circumventing its laws in a way that harms American and Western interests. And also, during which China transformed from an emerging economy specializing in producing cheap and inferior copies of Western products;
To the second largest global economy and a market that is witnessing a gradual shift towards leadership in heavy and developed industries, as well as the rise of "Xi Jinping" to lead China and his ambitious visions to expand the scope of Chinese influence, and Trump's rise in America with a stronger nationalist rhetoric. The trade war with China is one of his pillars, especially companies Big technology that works in a field that is very sensitive to US national security.
How did the Chinese communication dragon appear?
Huawei was founded in 1988 as a distributor of landlines in China, before it became, within thirty years, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world in terms of its production of equipment and devices related to the Internet as well as personal phones.
The company's success story, like its marketing counterpart, Alibaba, appears to be linked to an ambitious and unconventional entrepreneurial figure such as "Jack Ma", founder of the latter competing for Amazon, but Huawei was in fact founded and is still under the leadership of a former officer in the engineering unit of the Chinese Liberation Army called "Ren Jingfei" "
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.
During its first years of openness to global markets, China relied completely on imports to meet its needs in the field of communications equipment, and Huawei was at that time only a company that sold what it imported from Hong Kong in terms of telephone switches and fire alarms, but the company soon began to develop its switches. This is due to the early 1990s by dismantling and reinstalling foreign equipment, before it decided to shift its interest towards “developing a larger and more complex exchange that the major companies were not willing to transfer to Chinese companies,” as Chinese researcher Philly Ban points out, by relying entirely on technology Local and Chinese university researchers
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, instead of partnerships with foreign companies, reversing the trend at that time
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.
Despite being at the helm of a giant capitalist company, Ren always talks about Mao Zidong, founder of Communist China, as the main inspiration for the strategy to establish and expand Huawei. While Huawei was investing huge sums in its research to catch up with the latest American and Japanese technologies, it had to generate profits. In return, it is good to remain viable in the Chinese market, which gave preference to foreign investors during that period to make the latest products available to the Chinese.
Ren was inspired by Mao with the idea of founding from the countryside and then encircling cities, to give himself a competitive advantage against foreign companies that focused on cities and did not have any knowledge - or interest - in the countryside, just as Mao did in the face of the supported national system. Westerners in the cities before he took over the whole of China.
Accordingly, Huawei has already managed to achieve great profits from its dominance of the phone market in Chinese villages, and formed partnerships with local post and telecommunications services there to spread its devices in most parts of the countryside, before its huge investments in research and development finally bear fruit, and help it to penetrate cities and control a share. Sizeable from the entire Chinese market within one decade.
Huawei was not able to create the miracle alone, but the focus of its ability to achieve its goals was the shift of the Chinese government during the mid-1990s from unconditional encouragement of foreign investment to paying attention to Chinese emerging companies in vital areas and curbing the advantages of previously granted foreign telecommunications companies.
In that period, Huawei caught the attention of the ruling party and the Chinese army, and many high-ranking officials visited it politically and militarily, and the most prominent manifestations of its support in the countryside were agreements - which some considered controversial and semi-corrupt - that give employees of local administrations a percentage of Huawei's profits, in exchange for the latter's monopoly on the supply of all equipment. Telecommunications.
In parallel, Huawei’s shares rose gradually in cities, and obtained government contracts to work in railways, develop infrastructure and launch a communications network for the Chinese Liberation Army, in addition to opening the doors of generous financing for the company through huge and easy loans from government banks.
By the end of the 1990s, Huawei was on a date with global deals, as it set its first footing outside China with an investment in Hong Kong in 1996 to export telephone switches, after it had been importing them from there, paradoxically, less than a decade ago.
This was followed by a deal in Russia to supply Huawei’s own switches, then Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria and a number of African countries, and finally the countries of the European Union, which opened its doors with two deals in the Netherlands and Germany in 2001, then followed by other Western countries, including the United States, in the same year.
By 2004, Huawei has
been a
partner in 14 out of
19 deal to build third -
generation networks
3G
, and
then half
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fourth -
generation networks projects
4G
on the
European continent.
However, the growing role of Huawei in the telecommunications infrastructure in major countries, coinciding with the continuation of its close relationship with the Chinese government, and its failure to disclose
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the identity of its true owners, along with its CEO, Ren Jingfei, the last date in the Chinese Liberation Army, and the company's unwillingness to Offering its shares on the stock exchange, all of them constitute reasons to be apprehensive about the company's growing ambition to expand its contracts globally, especially in the major countries that consider China an enemy or a competitor, such as Japan and the United States, specifically during the next few years, which will witness the launch of the fifth generation of
5G
Internet networks
.
Huawei: a private company or a government arm?
Similar to its launch from rural China, Huawei’s global strategy is to gain emerging markets to expand its profit margin, enabling it to enter more heavily into developed markets, making it at the heart of the technology industry process taking place there, which finds resonance with dozens of developing countries wishing to obtain the latest Equipment and phones at the cheapest prices.
However, questions have grown a lot about the company's intentions, its relationship with the Chinese state, and its ability to be trusted to protect the data that passes through its equipment.
James Clapper, the former director of the CIA, says the Chinese tech company is one of those he agrees with the Trump administration.
Night after night, specifically between midnight and two in the morning, at the headquarters of the African Union in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, whose construction was funded by China, it was
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Internet servers send the data stored on the Union’s computers to other servers located in the Chinese city of Shanghai, before the espionage process was exposed by the African Union, and a comprehensive survey of the Union’s headquarters was conducted with a series of microphones hidden in the tables and walls, which were removed naturally at the same time that It replaced the Huawei maids used at the time.
While China categorically denied the allegations of espionage and even ridiculed them, the African Union, which is interested in Chinese investments, tried to play down the scandal to maintain relations with it, as the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame - who is in charge of the presidency of the Union at the time - stated that he did not believe that “something is going on.” Here (at the Federation headquarters) we do not want people to know about it .. and that I am not worried about being spied on in this building.
Kagame was not concerned with spying Huawei for the benefit of China, but many others are raising their concerns about the relationship between Huawei and the Chinese ruling regime, led by Washington, which began adopting policies to exclude Huawei from certain deals and areas in the US market since the Obama era.
For example,
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Obama in 2011 pressed to prevent Huawei's acquisition of the assets of the American technology company, Three Leaf, and signed
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In 2013, an anti-espionage law banned NASA and the ministries of commerce and justice from purchasing any information systems without the approval of federal officials, and they must issue an assessment of those systems that includes “any risk associated with the production, manufacture, or assembly” of any of its parts in China.
For its part, Beijing suspended its demand from Washington to backtrack on the law to maintain confidence in the relations between the two countries.
Says
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James Clapper, former director of the
National Intelligence Agency in the
Obama administration, that the
Chinese technology companies file one of the
files where consistent with Trump 's
management, as it believes should be considered as
« an
extension of
Chinese intelligence», which is the
path pursued by
clearly Trump administration and the
US Congress, The latter issued a law months ago that prohibited all federal agencies and their contracting parties from purchasing Chinese telecommunications equipment, in addition to a law
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recently prepared by the Trump administration to restrict all sales of Chinese telecoms in the United States.
These efforts are not only intended to protect networks and information within America today, but the most important issue now is the new information infrastructure that is being built to launch the fifth generation of Internet networks.
Huawei and 5G: the struggle for the next boom
The world is waiting for the launch of the fifth generation of Internet networks within a year or more, which are networks that will provide high speeds of communication up to twenty times the speed of its counterpart used today, and the genius and sensitivity of the fifth generation lies in the boom that it will cause in many areas, and the wider scope of its use that is expected to include all types of infrastructure And industries, as it helps
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to directly monitor the functioning of public utilities and machinery in factories remotely, and perhaps control them.
This will open the transition from the rapid transfer of information to the direct transmission of it with the possibility of integrating many operations in the world of the Internet that the speed alone was not sufficient to perform automatically or remotely, for example performing complete remote surgeries, which require high-speed direct transfer of much data about the location of each organic tissue. And each medical instrument with extreme precision that was not available before, and
self-driving
cars
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will also be able to
process an accurate and large set of data about their location, speed and speed of everything around them, in a way that enables them to make decisions regarding their direction in a period of time not exceeding fractions of a thousand in the second.
This surge will result in two problems for the concept of national security, the first of which is that the amount of information at risk - if the network is penetrated - is larger and wider and more sensitive and complex, and the second is that penetrating the network necessarily entails the possibility of manipulating it and then having the ability to disrupt or sabotage most if not all Ongoing operations in public facilities and spaces.
Hence, we can understand the last series of prohibiting or restricting dealing with Chinese technology companies in the United States and other Western countries that are putting the finishing touches on the fifth generation, as these countries have enjoyed the minimum level of trust between them since the end of World War II, even if those relations are marred by spy scandals. Sometimes, while its relations with China are characterized by much less confidence, given the logical conflict between countries that established - and benefited from - the existing international order, and an emerging country trying to occupy what it believes to be its natural position and displace its occupants.
Therefore, the list of countries concerned about Huawei has expanded, as it joined
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Australia last August by preventing the Chinese company from providing 5G technology implicitly through a law that referred to prohibiting the participation of companies subject to the directives of a foreign government, and New Zealand followed suit in November with the same measures, then Japan in last December, whose
government and telecom companies
abstained
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The four are about cooperation with Huawei - and the Chinese company ZTE as well - during the launch of the fifth generation, and the
British company
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British Telecom
also decided
to remove some Huawei equipment used in its fourth generation networks and not to deal with it in building fifth generation networks, and finally - days ago -
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The Taiwanese government has
banned
the use of any equipment Huawei made in its government facilities.
For its part, the central European Union countries, such as Germany, France and Italy, have not taken any decisions to prevent Huawei from participating in the fifth generation, as well as Huawei’s investments are still continuing far from Western governments and its important information structure, although several events here and there indicate to us an escalation in monitoring the company's violations from countries And European institutions, including Poland, which was arrested
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A Huawei employee and accused him of espionage;
An accusation that Huawei did not directly deny, but dismissed the employee and stated that he acted on his own, including the University of Oxford in Britain, which decided
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few days ago to refrain from accepting any research grants or donations from Huawei, provided that it reconsider the decision within three or six months from its date. .
The next chapter in the Huawei story
In defense of the free market principle, many Western voices continue to announce their rejection of the current approach to dealing with Huawei and other similar Chinese companies by excluding them alone, most notably the well-known American economist Jeffrey Sachs, who published an article last December describing what is happening as a reckless economic war. And commenting on the arrest of the daughter of the company’s president in Canada as a declaration of war on the Chinese business community, given that dozens of Western companies have evaded legal accountability despite similar dealings with the Iranian economy.
The danger of such a war lies, first, in what it represents in the revival of economic nationalism unprecedented since the two world wars, a nationalism that has previously proven disastrous, and secondly, in the harm it could cause to Chinese companies that ultimately ignite a national wave inside China that pushes the regime there to the right. And then to the instability of the global system, and thirdly, in the possibility of creating a partial isolation of China in a way that eliminates all the advantages that the West gained from integrating China into the capitalist system three decades ago, and finally, in the potential negative impact on the pace of technological modernization taking place in many poor countries due to the availability of Technologies on the part of Chinese companies are cheap, as indicated by The Economist in its August 2012 issue, as Huawei was already an important factor in the mobile revolution in Africa over the past decade.
For his part, the company’s president, Ren Zhengfei, sat quietly and confidently two weeks ago in a rare meeting he gave to the American media, and mocked what the West is doing with Huawei’s equipment.
He said: “Some in the West believe that Huawei’s equipment bears an ideological character. It’s just as funny as some of them smashed textile machinery at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the belief that it caused turmoil in the world.” He also affirmed that Huawei is a private company, as he cleverly referred to the company's experience in providing strong networks. In rural areas through cheap microwave technology, which many companies do not care about, compared to the extension of expensive optical fibers, especially with the dispersal of the population in rural American provinces, for example, confirming that the fifth generation stations made by Huawei do not need optical fibers;
"How can they enjoy watching HDTV in the future?"
If I exclude Huawei (from the launch of the fifth generation), those provinces will have to pay very high costs to enjoy that service, then the situation will be very different, and these countries may request on their own to buy the fifth generation products from Huawei, we are a consumer-focused company and then I think The possibility of selling our equipment to them in the future ».
President of Huawei, "Ren Jingfei" (Reuters)
Huawei remains confident of what it has achieved and how hard it will be to turn the tables on it with a stroke of a pen here and there, especially as it is now the largest manufacturer of communications equipment in the world.
This confidence is supported by strong statistics, the most prominent of which is the doubling of the profits of direct sales to consumers during the past year, exceeding seventy billion dollars, as stated by
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director of the company's consumer division, Richard Yu a few days ago, as he indicated that the company was not affected by the problems it faced in some western countries. Adding that the company will unveil its first 5G foldable smartphone next month.
Huawei has so far enjoyed the fruits of its hard work, from the age of landlines to the fourth generation, but the unprecedented exclusion of the company from the development of the fifth generation in major countries may change the path of that success.
We will need to wait, then, until the world actually enters the era of the fifth generation with all its mutations, for the limits and prospects of the American war on Huawei to become clear, especially after Trump's departure within a year or five at the most, and for the possibility of expanding and / or continuing to restrict it in major countries such as Japan. And Britain or not.
Until then, Ren and Richard's confidence in Huawei's future appears to be valid.