A customer shops for products in a Huawei store in Spain. (Photo via Getty Images)

 Scrapping Huawei and Combating China’s Economic Espionage

Around the world, countries are responding to China’s whole-of-government approach to economic espionage. Policymakers in the United Kingdom are set to expunge Huawei from the country's network after determining that the Chinese tech giant's products are a “severe” security threat. Meanwhile, the Indian government announced a ban last week on many Chinese apps, including TikTok, whose data mining practices impinge upon the "sovereignty and integrity of India" and all its users. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray joined Hudson yesterday to examine the threat posed by Huawei and other companies that fall under the authority of the Chinese Communist Party:  

“Huawei is a serial intellectual property thief, with a pattern and practice of disregarding both the rule of law and the rights of its victims. … If Chinese companies like Huawei are given unfettered access to our telecommunications infrastructure, they could collect any of your information that traverses their devices or networks. Worse still: they’d have no choice but to hand it over to the Chinese government if asked—the privacy and due process protections that are sacrosanct in the United States are simply non-existent in China.”

Sadly, this issue isn’t new, and as countries pursue safer telecom alternatives, Hudson Senior Fellow Thomas Duesterberg has examined how the U.S. can lead in the development of safe technology and global telecom standards. In the Wall Street Journal, he notes how U.S. companies are taking a different approach to developing 5G technology:

"U.S. industry is developing an alternative to hardware-based telecoms itself. Most promising is an emerging technology called network virtualization. The idea is to bypass much of the traditional wired connections, switches and other processing equipment with a virtual network. Almost all functionality is built into software, largely through cloud computing. This avoids the proprietary hardware base that Huawei exploits to maintain control over the components, software and functionality of its networks."

In Forbes, Duesterberg examines how a global push for export control tools can fight Chinese efforts to cheat innovators' patents:

"A related question is the frequent refusal of Chinese firms to honor patents incorporated into standards, called standard essential patents. They thus refuse to pay royalties to patent holders. Export control tools could be helpful in pushing back on these practices, which are employed not only by Huawei but other Chinese telecom operators and equipment makers such as Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile. One proposal, filed by Senator Marsha Blackburn, is designed to combat this practice. It would require any telecommunications company selling products in the U.S. market to prove they have a license to use U.S.-patented products or software. Hopefully other allied nations would follow the U.S. lead, since their technology firms face similar challenges with Chinese practices."

For more on how America and its allies can combat China’s efforts to steal innovation, checkout Hudson Senior Fellow Nadia Schadlow on securing the U.S. digital infrastructure in Defense News and Thomas Duesterberg's recent event on emerging 5G technologies in the United States, Japan, and Europe that could transform the telecommunications industry. And don't miss Walter Russell Mead's conversation with Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray on China's whole-of-state economic espionage efforts. 

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

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