Huawei is no more an arm of the CCP than any other Chinese company, and neither are they operating a "giant spy network" through their equipments. Please refrain from spreading the basic propaganda you're being fed.
Huawei does not answer to the West and has become too big in a strategic industry so the US took steps to attempt to kill it. It is simple geopolitical power struggle.
Huawei's real mistake is that they disrupt the silicon tech leadership of intel and other traditional vendors in that space, with a number of --- in hindsight ---- excellent strategic moves, for example
* they now hold a "controlling" majority of G5 mobile patents
* they are a strong and serious player in automotive
* ASIL D real time kernel for automotive functional safety
* integrated platform from microcontroller all the way to Android-alike in the UI
* this is unlike BOSCH, Continental, Renesas, Delphi/APITIV, etc, who were blocked by the traditional car vendors to create such a platform
* "Huawei aims at becoming a BOSCH" https://tcrn.ch/3v7O4z1
* serious cloud player
* serious player end to end in the mobile market (from backend via physical broadcast network to mobile phones and OS on top)
the list could go on and on
oh, and their ownership structure is spread ownership by employees. the majority shareholder is the founder with a whopping 1.9% of shares.
afaict they pay like FAANG/MAAMA/... and offer very comparable possibilities for personal development.
they are doing pretty much everything right while the traditional wealth has no control over them.
and _that_ is something "the West" fights nails and toes.
We read a lot on HN about Apple's M1 and how it was the first customer of TSMC's 5nm process. In fact, Huawei had bought the initial slot TSMC's 5nm process, and it was only the sanctions against Huawei that forced TSMC to reneg on its contracts and give them to Apple.
Most cell providers sell your location info to a third party broker to pad earnings. Then it gets resold in smaller and smaller amounts down the chain.
If your crazy ex wants to know where you were last night, they can jump in a telegram group run by someone at a PI firm reselling their access on the side and it'll cost less than your dinner did.
I like that your argument is that every business in China is government controlled. Why, yes you are correct. That doesn't negate my point.
China will collapse in a few decades due to lack of replacement population. They most certainly do "answer to the west". This is why they're being so aggressive about trying to get tech planted into western culture, and take Taiwan back, they know what's coming for them.
Maybe you ought to think a little further about why it's a power struggle?
After the bogus "Big Hack" story, Bloomberg's credibility in this subject area is in the gutter.
The article you link to is vague about what, exactly, Huawei supposedly did. If the US or Australian government had solid evidence of something like that the article claims, I have no doubt that they would be shouting it from the rooftops.
> If the US or Australian government had solid evidence of something like that the article claims, I have no doubt that they would be shouting it from the rooftops.
Huawei even let the UK secret service inspect Huawei networking gear, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. They only found badly written software, which is hardly unusual. A much more likely explanation for the US sanction on Huawei is simply anti-competitive measures. Huawei had simply outcompeted the western telecom gear providers, and they complained to their governments to ban the superior competition.
> Huawei even let the UK secret service inspect Huawei networking gear, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. They only found badly written software, which is hardly unusual.
Which, by the way, is the perfect cover for a backdoor, because it's deniable.
> A much more likely explanation for the US sanction on Huawei is simply anti-competitive measures.
No, it's 100% geopolitical maneuvering. IIRC, US companies don't even sell competing equipment in many of the relevant areas. You don't need "evidence" of a backdoor in order to distrust something.
Huawei's lead in 5G is well-documented, e.g. [1]. I left the 5G consultancy space in about 2021, but at the time Huawei was the only company that managed to put a CPU and a 5G modem on a single chip. As far as I am aware Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and MediaTek can also do this in 2023, but came later. I'm already not sure if Intel can do this as of April 2023.
> Huawei is superior tech and yet they have horrible code
What's hilarious about this? Most large scale software has terrible parts. I worked a lot with Cisco gear after graduating from university. Our team found lots of security vulnerabilities. Still Cisco routers were very good, in comparison with what was on the market. Huawei's breakthrough was largely in signal processing.
> US did find backdoors.
The article states that those Huawei 'backdoors' are, from your article: "backdoors intended for law enforcement". Those are a legal requirement. You cannot get telecom equipment certified in the US and EU if they don't have those backdoors.
Your points (1, 2) have nothing to do with what I have written, why do you side-track the conversation?
Well documented in Wired, lol! I would settle for just one peer-reviewed article in a reputed journal. Even written by Huawei authors.
> backdoors intended for law enforcement
When did Chinese law become global law?
> Your points (1, 2) have nothing to do with what I have written, why do you side-track the conversation?
Talking of sidetracking, didn't you mention Instagram vs TikTok? Lol.
Anyways, just like your Instagram vs TikTok comment, my comments are relevant. They are about companies banning other companies with superior tech. Claims of sidetracking are usually surfaced when there is no viable defense.
Not to mention, Huawei was caught with its pants down stealing code from Cisco.
> just one peer-reviewed article in a reputed journal.
You are upping the ante! Shouldn't a good leader lead by example? Where is your verifiable evidence of Huawei backdoors? I am working and publish in computer security, I am able to verify backdoors personally. Can you point me to such code?
Anyway, in addition to user "froh"'s points in a sibling post, here are more examples of Huawei technical leadership:
(1) An important NLP benchmark where Huawei is essentially as good as Microsoft and Google.
When did US law become global law? The point is: any telecom gear provider that wants to sell telecom gear in the EU or US is required to add law enforcement backdoors.
> Huawei was caught with its pants down stealing code from Cisco.
Like most companies in developing countries, they started out making knock-off gear. Over 3 decades they went from copying other people's ideas to world leadership in 5G. Congratulations!
Interesting, thanks. I didn't realise that it was already in 2020.
Huawei announced its first SoC with integrated 5G modem, the Kirin 990 [1], in September 2019. The Kirin 990 5G was featured in Huawei's flagship smartphone, the Mate 30, which was launched in the same month. So Huawei was only 1 year ahead of Qualcomm on the consumer side.
The US is trying to avoid repeating the mistake it made with the USSR of allowing a hostile nation to buy its way to a modern industrial/technology base.
> The US is trying to avoid repeating the mistake it made with the USSR of allowing a hostile nation to buy its way to a modern industrial/technology base.
As far as I'm aware, the US didn't make that mistake with the USSR. IIRC, it was always under pretty strict export controls.
IMHO, if the US allowed to any country to "buy its way to a modern industrial/technology base" that country was China.
There's a somewhat famous (possibly apocryphal?) story about the USSR's campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers to reverse engineer. The CIA would intercept shipments they suspected were being sold to the Soviets and fill the boxes with rocks before sending them along to be picked up by KGB agents in South America.
Ultimately the Soviets did end up procuring a few western machines and reverse-engineering them. This is a look at one such machine - essentially a desktop PDP-11 used by the Soviet nuclear power industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1EWsWxObjA
There were pdp-11s everywhere in the 1970s, and the designs were published (I have the schematics in my desk drawer here on microfiche). They were built from off the shelf TTL chips that again could be bought everywhere (things like UARTs often did use an LSI chip, bit harder to get hold of but still readily available) So it's inconceivable that a state level actor couldn't easily produce clones, even without ever having seen one! All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater.
There were pdp-11s everywhere in the 1970s, and the designs were published (I have the schematics in my desk drawer here on microfiche). They were built from off the shelf TTL chips...
> All the stories about "campaign to get its hand on American minicomputers" etc is theater.
The stories might be true, but not so much about acquiring the designs as quality implementations.
> Soviet industry was unable to mass-produce computers to acceptable quality standards[6] and locally manufactured copies of Western hardware were unreliable.[7] As personal computers spread to industries and offices in the West, the Soviet Union's technological lag increased.[8]
> ...
> Since computers were considered strategic goods by the United States, their sale by Western countries was generally not allowed without special permission.[39] As a result of the CoCom embargo, companies from Western Bloc countries could not export computers to the Soviet Union (or service them) without a special license.[84]
China is not inherently hostile to the US. They are strengthening and have more resources to assert themselves like any country would and should, which is actually what the US are hostile to because they don't want competition.
On the other hand, if the USSR's aim was world revolution then yes they were inherently hostile to the US.
The US does not, and will not allow a "near peer" nation to exist, ever. It will use all the tools at its disposal to avoid that situation from ever happening, that's one of its own very core tenets for national security
Japan, China, Brazil, etc it does not matter if it's actually aggressive against the US or not
This of course also means that China not being a democracy is just convenient to make them the 'bad guys', but is not really the issue and I expect things would be exactly the same if China was a democracy.
> This of course also means that China not being a democracy is just convenient to make them the 'bad guys', but is not really the issue and I expect things would be exactly the same if China was a democracy.
That's, frankly, nonsense.
Things most certainly would not "be exactly the same if China was a democracy" and had political values compatible with the US.
One the one hand the issues between the US and China are not about "political values", they are about geopolitical interests, you could make a list and check one by one. That wouldn't change if China was a democracy. On the other hand, the US are best 'friend', and have been best 'friend' with some of the least democratic countries on the planet.
QED.
Edit: In fact the US do not want China to become a democracy as that would actually hurt their strategy and interests against China. For instance, that would make a reunification with Taiwan more likely, which the US do not want at all.
> One the one hand the issues between the US and China are not about "political values", they are about geopolitical interests, you could make a list and check one by one. That wouldn't change if China was a democracy. On the other hand the US is best 'friend', and has been best 'friend' with some of the least democratic countries on the planet.
It's not about one or the other, it's about both (i.e. China both having the power to be geopolitical rival and having incompatible political values). If one or the other would be true, the situation would be quite different.
Also, the US hasn't been "best 'friend[s]' with some of the least democratic countries on the planet." It certainly has been willing to court them and look the other way in the context of a larger geopolitical effort, but once the political necessity stops, the "friendliness" gets cold.
> Edit: In fact the US do not want China to become a democracy as that would actually hurt their strategy and interests against China. For instance, that would make a reunification with Taiwan more likely, which the US do not want at all.
Oh come on. That's utter nonsense.
The US strategy towards China was economic liberalization would bring political liberalization. Xi has demonstrated that the Americans were fools to think that, so their strategy is changing.
Why should it matter that China and the U.S. have incompatible political values? And what does that even mean? It's not like the two systems need to interface in ways where that matters. If you're trying to negotiate a treaty it doesn't really matter how the other country's delegation got their jobs.
> Why should it matter that China and the U.S. have incompatible political values? And what does that even mean?
Because people have moral values they care a lot about, and those are frequently reflected in their political systems. I don't know so much about China in that regard, but in the West those moral values certainly tend to be conceived in universalist terms.
> It's not like the two systems need to interface in ways where that matters. If you're trying to negotiate a treaty it doesn't really matter how the other country's delegation got their jobs.
Your kind of conceiving of the "interface" as some abstract thing up in the clouds. Sure, it probably doesn't really matter so much "how the other country's delegation got their jobs," but it certainly does matter what policies their government implements or positions its pursuing. In the case of the US and China, those definitely conflict in irreconcilable ways (e.g. over the status of Taiwan, civil liberties, etc.).
This sounds like the motive for religious war. Are we not tolerant enough to let other peoples have their own political systems?
It took a couple hundred years for Europeans to stop killing each other in the wake of the Reformation. Maybe we still haven't gotten over the instinct that somewhere, someone is doing it wrong and we have to do something about it.
> This sounds like the motive for religious war. Are we not tolerant enough to let other peoples have their own political systems?
You seem to be conflating morality with religion. There's overlap, but they're not the same.
> Maybe we still haven't gotten over the instinct that somewhere, someone is doing it wrong and we have to do something about it.
OK, see about that: are you tolerant enough to let your neighbor non-consensually beat his wife for being disobedient? Rape his kids? If you feel those things are wrong, do you think that's an instinct you should "get over"?
The history of the relationship with Japan in the late 80s would show us ally or not is not relevant. Japan was constantly demonized before it’s economy collapsed after the plaza accord…
That view seems extremely inconsistent to me, and not defensible at all.
On one hand, you have an authoritarian one-party government (only one less party than the US :P), where you put trade sanctions on basically consumer goods, while you actually supply weapon systems to an ABSOLUTE MONARCHY in Saudi Arabia?!
It seems rather clear to me that "defense of democratic values" is absolutely not the primary motivation, but basically jealousy, and China IS a potential geopolitical (future?) rival, while the corrupt, murderous kleptocracts in Arabia are a convenient fuel provider and vassal.
I'm not saying US foreign policy is WRONG-- just don't lie to yourself and others about its motivations...
One of the first things Zelensky did after Russia invaded was to outlaw all other political parties.
The U.S. government is fully supportive of this one party state.
It's all realpolitik. Our leaders would never let a country's system of government override its usefulness to us. The Cold War is awash with examples of us supporting terrible dictators who aligned with us against the USSR.
> One of the first things Zelensky did after Russia invaded was to outlaw all other political parties.
That assertion appears to be an exaggeration from what I can tell. Can you back up your statement that all other parties were banned, as opposed to some?
> Late last year, Zelenskyy announced Poroshenko was being investigated for treason, and this past March, 11 political parties were suspended and any of their elected members dismissed from office for being pro-Russian. Most were fringe, but one party had nearly 10% of seats in Ukraine's Parliament.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/1110577439/zelenskyy-has-cons...
Certainly banning some is starting down a path, but there is a big difference between All and Some. Particularly in the context of a country being invaded.
The consolidation and control of television outlets in Ukraine by Zelensky is also worth noting, of course.
You're right, it's not all. I must have mis-remembered.
Though I'll note that a lot of the states we consider to be "One Party" actually do allow controlled opposition parties, they just never let them gain actual power. With Ukraine banning its second largest party, Zelensky's party goes from about 40% to about 60%, and wouldn't need to form a coalition government.
> Zelensky's party goes from about 40% to about 60%, and wouldn't need to form a coalition government.
Can you cite your source for that information? I can't seem to find anything which matches it.
Based on below it appears they had a ~56% majority in the last election. Has there been a change in the composition since then?
"In the 21 July 2019 parliamentary election, Zelenskyy's political party, Servant of the People, won the first single-party majority in modern Ukrainian history in parliament, with 43 per cent of the party-list vote. His party gained 254 of the 424 seats.[113]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy
The fact that the US is not dunking on Saudi Arabia does not change the fact that the CCP is a murderous, genocidal, antidemocratic force that needs to be contained.
Whataboutism would if we were arguing about "China bad" and I pointed out "Saudis worse".
But we're not. My point is that "protecting democratic values" is quite obviously NOT the prime motivation for US foreign policy-- this can be seen VERY clearly where US interests conflict with "protection of democratic values".
The Saudis are just a very obvious recent example, but there are countless others-- like the coup against the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953, or the whole Snowden affair (spying on fully democratic allies, but also showing that even internal democratic concerns--constitutional rights + governmental agency accountability-- are secondary to national interests).
The whole Snowden thing would have been an excellent opportunity to build credibility in this regard, to reassure citizens and allies alike, by simply admitting: "We did questionable, undemocratic things, but we're gonna fix it!", start by throwing James Clapper into prison for a few years, dissolve the Guantanamo bay concentration camp, and reinforce your citizens constitutional rights to not get spied on by your own government. But alas...
You said, literally. "Whatabout Saudi Arabia." That's called whataboutism.
Also SA is not worse than China. Saudi Arabia may have some modern day slavery going on, but China is depriving over a billion of basic freedoms and currently commiting genocide. They support North Korea, thr most oppressive regime on earth. They promote in their propaganda the worst mass murderer in History by far, Mao Zedong.
But as always, there's people like you to say "but whatabout so-and-so."
I repeat: I'm NOT discussing the relative merits of the Chinese/Saudi regimes- I'm using the Saudis as a very recent example of how US foreign policy is clearly NOT primarily motivated by "spreading democratic values".
You have so far neither addressed any of my actual points nor have you tried to make arguments in favor of your view.
What are your precedents that give you such confidence that US foreign policy is primarily aimed at spreading democratic values instead of furthering US interests first and foremost?
Precedent isn't whataboutism. You cannot claim that the intentions of the US are to oppose dictatorships or whatever while also supporting saudi arabia. I mean, you can, but no amount of "whataboutism" accusations will make the claim credible. It's fine to just say that the US is doing it to counter a geopolitical rival, it requires a lot less mental gymnastics.
It's fine to criticize the Chinese government for not being democratic or for restricting freedom of speech, but it's not genocidal, and over the last several decades, it's been far less murderous and aggressive than the US government. China hasn't even fought a war in over 40 years. No amount of invocations of "whataboutism" will erase the fact that the US killed hundreds of thousands of people in an illegal war in Iraq, while China has basically kept to itself for decades.
Huh? Have you just ignored the last decade of news? China is mostly certainly genocidal. They've put Uyghurs in concentration camps and sterilized them. The question, is why are you apologizing for them and pretending this didn't happen?
It's committing genocide on the Uyghur people. Of course we don't have a lot of evidenc, you'll say. Same thing useful people likely you said in the 1930s about the Holodomor. And there wasn't much evidence back then either for the same reason: communist dictatorship doing a hard lock down on journalism, and people like you to turn a blind eye to the horror.
It's the first "genocide" in history in which nobody was killed.
The people claiming it's a "genocide" don't even claim that anyone is being killed. If you actually press them, they try to redefine the word "genocide" to mean something completely different.
Words have meaning, and a word as important as "genocide" should not be thrown around in bad faith as a polemical tool.
They're sterilizing them and putting them in camps. This is in effect killing them off for the future. Stop apologizing for China. It's weird and gross. It makes me think you have some ulterior motive here. Were you just brainwashed to support them in college or something?
> It's the first "genocide" in history in which nobody was killed
Forcible displacement of populations and remvoing children from their parents and culture is considered genocide. For an example of the latter, see Putin's recent indictment by the ICC.
Nobody in the public would consider what China is doing genocide.
The word "genocide" means mass murder of an entire ethnic group. You're using the word because you know that that's how people interpret it, and you want the shock value.
Exactly as I said, when pressed, you try to redefine the word to mean something completely different.
By the way, even the far lesser claims you're making are incorrect. The Uyghur population in Xinjiang continues to grow, life expectancy is increasing, the language not only continues to be spoken but even continues to be the primary language used to teach Uyghur children in school. There is political repression, targeted particularly at what China regards as separatism and religious extremism, but the "genocide" accusation is pure bad faith.
Oh weird... then why are there thousands of articles from the west and several NATO countries calling it genocide? It meets the definition of genocide. Are you a Chinese state actor or just a brainwashed college student?
> The fact that the US is not dunking on Saudi Arabia does not change the fact that the CCP is a murderous, genocidal, antidemocratic force that needs to be contained.
IIRC, the US did in fact "dunk" on Saudi Arabia after the Khashoggi murder, which kind of screwed them when they wanted cooperation to lower oil prices that wasn't given.
They send spies into our universities to steal research and plant communist ideas. They use TikTok as a brainwashing tool(censored in their own country), buy up US farmland, buy up buildings/property displacing US citizens, send spy balloons etc..
They are inherently hostile. It's a joke for you to say otherwise.
That does not match my understanding of the history.
A) Didn't the US prevent technology transfer to the USSR as much or more so?
B) The analyses I have seen have said that the reason the USSR fell is because it could not match the USA industrial/technology base, and specifically that in trying to keep up with US defense spending, they ended up spending 12-15% of GDP on defense (compared ~5-6% in US at the time), and that this was a big problem for them, that they were spending more than they could afford on defense.
C) At the time the USSR fell, which the US considered positive and a victory... it still didn't have a "modern industrial/technology base", did it? At that point, we started helping Russia (not the USSR) develop that, and encouraged privatization of the economy... that was done in a way to create an oligarchy... that led Russia to where it is.
i don't understand what you're talking about, a history where the US "made the mistake of allowing the USSR to buy its way to a modern industrial/technology base". By doing... what? That resulted in... what? What actions or inactions of the US or USSR are you talking about?
It's both, because both are a threat to our standard of living. This is obvious. The question for you is why you would prefer to lower our standard of living and become subservient to a communist led genocidal government? Does that sound like a good path to go down?
I don't understand what the point of sanctions are. Is Huawei going to stop existing? No. Is the US government ever going to trust Huawei? No. Might as well allow US businesses to make some money selling Huawei spinning rust platters.
> How is american governments access to other nations data fine but not the other way around?
Nothing's stopping nation-states from forking Linux-based systems and open source tools to circumvent Microsoft, Apple, Netgear, etc. There isn't enough political buy-in to wean countries off of Windows, Mac, Android, Intel, AMD etc.
German schools for a while used OpenOffice as Office 365 had too many privacy issues. But these are small-scale changes that are temporary, and don't go beyond the muncipality level [0].
So the US Government is banning US companies from selling to Huawei for US national security reasons. Those reasons can relate to potential threats rather than proven actions. There is no court of law and presumption of innocence until proven guilty in this process.
The Chinese government could absolutely ban Chinese companies from selling to companies closely affiliated with the US Government if they wanted to and I imagine there are some Chinese companies/products that are subject to export restrictions.
Various governments around the world are enforcing different import/export/data rules to protect their citizens.
These things are all 'fine' or at least understandable and well within the expected behaviour of sovereign nations.
Uhhhhh apples to oranges. The level of functionality on behalf of the government is completely different (being that Huawei is an arm of the PRC) making your comparison off base. Documented intel management engine…
Last I know, there is no tangible evidence linking documented backdoors in huawei network equipment. If my memory serves me right, huawei was ahead of others in 5G and american and other companies saw that as a threat and suddenly huawei equipment had unknown backdoors and suspicions.
I would be happy to be proved wrong but how does being funded or managed or owned by PRC influence anything unless there are actual backdoors?
Just because huawei is funded by PRC does that make them guilty?
When national security is at stake you can’t trust your literal greatest rival to build your infrastructure. I really don’t think people making arguments like this are being honest, they just can’t be.
Yeah actually, I'd rather have my government doing the backdooring than a foreign one. My interests are generally more aligned with the US government's than China's.
No one ideally, but in the real world someone is going to be. It's considered basically accepted by governments, just don't get caught.
That being said, it's interesting that a lot of the China vs US heat started ramping up right when China rounded up a bunch of CIA assets in the country. It's arguable from a game theory perspective that everyone's better off with a bunch of spying so everyone knows what's really going on in a country. Transparency is usually considered good in other areas. I can't see why that wouldn't apply here.
It's also worth pointing out that by and large, it's very likely the important programs aren't spying on day to day citizens, especially as the war on terror has faded. They're just not that important, and it's riskier. It's economic, military, and political espionage.
