Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 10The War Against Huawei

Huawei Technologies is China’s most strategically important company.

As the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, it has become a symbol of China’s growing economic might and technical prowess. It is a proxy—willing or not—of Beijing’s wider geopolitical aims.

In response, Washington has mounted a three-pronged campaign to counter Huawei’s global presence. The first prong involves the attempted blockage of technology transfers to Huawei from the U.S. and other advanced economies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the E.U. The second prong features U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials who aim to convince other nations to ‘rip and replace’ Huawei’s equipment from their telecommunications networks. The third prong, which is less known, involves Washington’s efforts to decouple HMN Tech from undersea fibre optic cable networks. HMN was previously known as Huawei Marine Networks, before it was sold to China’s Hengtong Group and rebranded as HMN Tech.

Huawei is now so fully immersed in the U.S.–China hybrid cold war that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has delegated key components of its semiconductor masterplan to the telecom equipment giant. Beijing hopes that Huawei can expedite the building of an indigenous chip ecosystem in China. In its leadership capacity, Huawei has been partnering with local firms in the semiconductor value chain, and serving as an investor, coordinator, advisor and liaison with academic ...