Huawei’s Guo ups the ante in 5G war of words, accusing the US of wanting to suppress a rising competitor
- In an FT opinion piece, Huawei’s chairman cites Snowden leaks about NSA activity and economic security as reasons for US attack on its 5G business
Amid an ongoing campaign by the US to shut Huawei out of global 5G markets on national security grounds, Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping has upped the ante by saying that US attacks are motivated by a desire to suppress a rising competitor in a strategic area of technology.
A US delegation led by Ajit Pai, Federal Communications Commission chair, to this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona – the industry’s largest trade show where Guo himself spoke – repeated a call to keep Huawei out of global 5G networks.
Guo says part of the reason for US attacks on Huawei can be found in documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013 about the activities of the US National Security Agency.
Guo says the Snowden leaks illuminated how the NSA’s leaders were seeking to “collect it all” – meaning every electronic communication sent by anyone in the world, anywhere, anytime. Moreover, the documents also showed that the NSA maintains “corporate partnerships” with certain US technology and telecoms companies that allow it to “gain access to high-capacity fibre-optic cables, switches and/or routers across the world”.
As the world’s biggest telecoms equipment maker but with headquarters in China, Guo says there is little chance of Huawei having such a “corporate partnership” and that it is very unlikely that any Chinese company would ever comply with an NSA request to modify equipment in order to eavesdrop. Guo says this is one reason why the NSA itself hacked into Huawei’s servers.
“Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” Guo cites a 2010 NSA document as stating. “We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products.”
As such, Guo says Huawei’s success has become an obstacle for the NSA to “collect it all”, hampering the US agency’s efforts to spy on whoever it wants, when it wants.
Guo adds that a range of US laws, including the recent Cloud Act, “empower the US government to compel telecoms companies to assist” in US global surveillance, as long as the order is framed as an investigation involving counter-intelligence or counterterrorism.
The second reason for US attacks on Huawei, according to Guo, can be explained by the economic and social benefits on offer to whoever can first roll out new 5G networks – which will provide the connective tissue for high speed, high capacity data connections for everything from smart factories to electric power grids.
China has the world’s largest mobile market by subscriber and network size, but other countries have thus far taken the lead in wireless communications technology development.
That is why China regards next-generation 5G networks – which offer faster data rates, reduced latency, energy savings, cost reductions, higher system capacity and massive device connectivity – as a chance to get out in front for the first time. Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged the country to develop its own strategic technologies and become less reliant on foreign imports – for economic and security reasons.
Guo says Huawei has been investing heavily in 5G for the past year, putting it “roughly a year ahead of our competitors”, making it attractive to countries who want to upgrade to 5G soon. Stopping Huawei means quashing a company that curtails US digital dominance – hence the attacks, according to Guo.
Guo ends by saying that the “fussilade” being directed at Huawei is a “direct result of Washington’s realisation that the US has fallen behind in developing a strategically important technology” – so it has little to do with security and everything to do with suppressing a rising competitor.
