Asia’s Great Huawei Debate

The United States has been leading the charge against Huawei, a Chinese tech firm that not only has a popular smartphone brand but supplies internet and mobile technology around the world. Concerns in Washington date back to 2012, when the intelligence committee of the U.S. House of Representatives found that both Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese telecom firm, pose security risks. The intelligence committee strongly encouraged U.S. firms not to do business with either company. Among other concerns, the committee found that Huawei and ZTE were unwilling or unable to clarify the role the Chinese government played in their operations, leaving open the possibility their technology could be used for state espionage.

“Find another vendor if you care about your intellectual property; if you care about your consumers' privacy and you care about the national security of the United States of America,” Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican congressman from Michigan and then the intelligence committee chair, said at the time.

If anything, U.S. rhetoric against Huawei has grown more strident since 2012. Concerns about potential espionage, including hypothetical pre-installed “backdoors” allowing the Chinese state to access Huawei technology, have lingered, although no examples have ever been found and Huawei has always denied such allegations. Meanwhile, concerns about Huawei’s alleged theft of intellectual property and other shady business practices abound – including reportedly violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, a charge that got Huawei’s chief financial officer arrested in Canada in late 2018.

Based on these overlapping concerns, the U.S. government banned Huawei from being used in U.S. government systems or by U.S. government contractors. In May 2019, as trade talks between China and the United States collapsed (again), the Trump administration went a step further and placed Huawei on an “entity list” – effectively banning U.S. companies from doing business with the firm. That meant, in essence, that Huawei would have no access to U.S. technology. While not a proverbial “death blow,” it was a huge setback; Huawei itself estimated the blacklisting would cost the company at least $30 billion.

U.S. President Donald Trump walked that decision back at the end of June 2019, however, when he (again) agreed to restart trade talks after a one-on-one meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Knowing the importance Beijing places on Huawei’s success, Trump announced that Washington would be allowing sales of U.S technology to Huawei. His U-turn, while widely covered in the media, was also incredibly vague. Various U.S. officials, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (in charge of the entity list) and National Economic Council chair Larry Kudlow, have signalled that at least some restrictions remain in place. The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, introduced a bill that would block Trump from relaxing the ban on Huawei (for example, by granting waivers to U.S. companies seeking to do business with the Chinese firm) without congressional approval. While the bill has not yet passed, it has bipartisan support in both chambers.

The U.S. action against Huawei is particularly important at this moment, as the world is currently poised to roll out fifth-generation cellular network technology, or 5G. Huawei is positioned as a major provider of this cutting-edge technology, which is expected to power a worldwide takeoff of the Internet of Things. The prospect of Chinese dominance over 5G seems to have been a wake-up call for the U.S. government, and became a focal point for the anti-Huawei campaign. The Trump administration has been working to convince other countries not to allow Huawei to build their 5G networks.

As we’ll see below, those efforts have had extremely mixed results. The debate over whether Huawei poses a security risk (and, if so, whether its low costs and competitive services outweigh those concerns) reaches very different conclusions in different Asian countries. Close U.S. partners like Singapore and South Korea are still very much keeping open the possibility of Huawei participating in their 5G rollouts. India has been so far unable to choose between its own security concerns and Huawei’s low costs, which are nearly irresistible for a developing country. And on the other end of the spectrum, Japan has a de facto ban in place while Australia outpaced even the United States by officially banning Huawei from its 5G network in 2018.

In this rest of this article, experts on each of those countries explain how the Huawei debate has unfolded domestically, and what conclusions (if any) were reached.