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szdaily -> Business/Markets -> 
Trump’s attempts to ban Huawei look like a failure
    2019-05-10  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

U.S. President Donald Trump’s worldwide campaign to blackball Huawei Technologies Co. is looking like a failure.

Trump’s attempts to persuade other governments to exclude Huawei equipment from the next generation of super-fast mobile networks have hit a wall — even among close allies. So far, only a handful of countries, including Australia and Japan, have joined the United States’ call to boycott the Shenzhen-based company.

Not a single European nation has done so, not even the U.K., triggering a scolding from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in London on Wednesday.

“Now is the exact opposite time to go wobbly,” Pompeo said, invoking the famous locution that Margaret Thatcher, the U.K. prime minister from 1979 to 1990, used to spur the United States into sending troops to Kuwait after Iraq invaded it in 1990. “Would she allow China to control the Internet of the future?”

Huawei, meanwhile, is piling up record sales, forging into new markets, passing Apple Inc. as a phone maker and cementing its position as a leading global supplier of telecom gear.

Now, a newly confident Huawei is planning to rebuild its U.S. presence after assuming a low profile the past few years. It put a seasoned insider, Joy Tan, in charge of public affairs in the United States, where it plans a print ad campaign, amplified by social media, in coming months.

“It’s winning,” said Robert Spalding, a retired Air Force brigadier general who was a strategist at the National Security Council under Trump who has spoken out about the risks of letting China dominate new generation wireless technology. The United States doesn’t seem able “to do anything that would fundamentally change things,” said Spalding, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy group.

Not for lack of trying. The United States for the past year has sent diplomats around the globe to beseech other countries to shun Huawei. Among the accusations, it says Huawei can build backdoors into its equipment, enabling spying by the Chinese government and posing a security risk for the fifth-generation mobile networks that will connect billions of devices, from autonomous cars to robot-rich factories and home refrigerators.

The United States also says Huawei has stolen other companies’ intellectual property. At the United States’ request, Canada since December has held Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the eldest daughter of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, while the United States seeks her extradition on charges of violating Iran sanctions.

The warnings have been considered by countries throughout Europe and Asia, but more often than not, brushed aside. The reasons aren’t hard to find. Huawei’s gear is reliable, technologically advanced and less costly than its rivals’, said Joseph Franell, CEO of Eastern Oregon Telecom, a rural service provider and early Huawei customer.

Huawei has said that governments and customers in 170 countries use its equipment, which poses no greater cybersecurity threat than that of any communications technology vendor.

Huawei’s rotating chairman, Guo Ping, said in a February opinion piece that the fusillade against Huawei results from Washington’s realization that the United States has fallen behind in developing 5G technology, and has little to do with security.

Trump’s most recent provocation — threatening to raise tariffs on US$200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent because trade talks are moving too slowly — further complicates matters.

The latest snag came last week at a two-day, 32-country meeting in Prague to set standards for 5G equipment. Government officials presented a united front with a statement that warned against choosing suppliers that could be susceptible to state influence. But behind the scenes, Germany, France and Austria sought changes, including that the statement’s title be switched from “principles” to the less stringent “proposals,” according to one Western official, to stress that the document would be nonbinding.

The Prague proposals may leave some European countries to adopt a two-tiered approach in which they exclude Huawei equipment from the core of their networks, where massive data flow, while allowing it to supply antennas and other parts for less-sensitive functions, said Paul Triolo, an analyst at the Eurasia Group.

The U.K. is considering an approach similar to that for its 5G network, people familiar with the matter said last month. The European Union also stopped short of a ban, and has asked member states to assess the risk to their 5G network infrastructure and report back by mid-July.

Italy’s government has dismissed the U.S. warnings as it seeks to increase trade with China. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she opposes singling out an individual company to ban. Germany instead plans more stringent testing, oversight and approval guidelines that will apply to all vendors.

Throughout Europe, carriers are fighting threats of a Huawei ban because they rely heavily on the supplier and believe they will fall behind the rest of the world on 5G if they are forced to abandon Huawei.

In the United States, beyond the ad campaign, Huawei is suing to overturn legislation that bars agencies, federal contractors and grant recipients from doing business with it. Tan, who headed Huawei’s global communications in Shenzhen and prepared the CEO for media interviews, took over the U.S. media-relations operation, including its Washington office, in January.

“Blocking one company from the U.S. market is not going to make the network secure,” Tan said, pointing to the global supply chain, which relies heavily on components made in China. She notes that Huawei has worked with U.K. authorities to develop a third-party certification system to check for backdoors and other security risks, and said that’s the approach policymakers should adopt.

Tan has had trouble getting that point across in Washington, where the company scaled back operations less than a year ago. Its government relations shop remains small, and one longtime lobbyist at an outside firm, Don Bonker of APCO Worldwide, stopped representing the company in March. Huawei wants to reach out to congressional and administration policymakers but “we don’t get too many meetings,” she said. (SD-Agencies)

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