Huawei’s Global Influence

THOMAS MCARDLE was a White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush and writes for IssuesInsights.com. Thomas McArdle

Mayberry RED

Huawei’s tentacles extend to the heartland of America

During the ‘60s and ‘70s, U.S. anti-communists were subjected to much scoffing and giggling about their dread of “reds under the bed,” culminating in President Jimmy Carter bemoaning Americans’ “inordinate fear of communism” and declaring that “through failure” in fighting communist expansionism, “we have now found our way back to our own principles and values.”

Then, came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979. Within a year, Carter was defeated in his bid for reelection by Ronald Reagan, who would call Russia an “Evil Empire” destined for “the ash heap of history.”

All these years later, it turns out that small-town America’s telecom businesses found themselves riddled with a kind of 21st-century, high-tech stealthy threat not too far removed from Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s warning about the dangers of fluoridated water in the film “Dr. Strangelove.” Andy Griffith’s innocent “Mayberry R.F.D.” has found reds not under the bed but, rather, over their heads in the cellphone towers.

Rather than our precious bodily fluids, the Chinese Communist Party is making use of the electromagnetic radio waves traveling through the air above and around us. The Biden administration is now investigating Chinese global telecom giant Huawei’s use of hardware in U.S. cell towers in rural areas that could intercept transmissions used by military bases and intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile silos, which Huawei might place into Beijing’s hands.

China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law requires that “an organization or citizen shall support, assist in, and cooperate in national intelligence work in accordance with the law and keep confidential the national intelligence work that it or he knows.” Cellphone towers near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana are one of the concerns.

Huawei was founded in 1987 by a former engineer for communist China’s People’s Liberation Army, Ren Zhengfei—officially deputy chairman, but that’s a misleading title since he runs the firm. Disgracefully, it was the United States that enabled Huawei, with IBM lending its expertise in product development and financial management as it sought market expansion into China.

Now claiming a third of the world’s population as customers in 170 countries, Huawei’s tentacles extend to small telecom providers in the U.S. heartland. Wyoming-based Union Wireless, founded in 1914, touts its Western rural values; its founder is typically pictured sporting a cowboy hat and bolo tie. Union heard about Huawei’s low-cost and swift work from another small carrier.

It turned to the Chinese company when a vendor dragged its feet in implementing an equipment upgrade. Huawei “worries about getting the problem fixed first and then worries about getting paid,” according to Union customer relations chief Brian Woody.

Huawei’s artificially low pricing was irresistible for many smaller U.S. telecom firms, such as Union, but today, in the wake of the Trump administration finding Huawei to be a security threat and effectively banning U.S. businesses from dealing with it, Union and many other smaller rural firms who engaged with Huawei are disentangling themselves. Last year, Union Wireless settled on Finland’s Nokia to replace its Huawei equipment with Nokia’s AirScale 4G-5G portfolio, an expensive proposition that’s being assisted by federal subsidies.

Sad to say, the red flags regarding Huawei were known long before Union and the other U.S. regional providers invited this fox into the hen house. In 2003, Cisco Systems sued Huawei for its bythen infamous practice of reverse-engineering its competitors’ products, in this case electronically copying and inserting Cisco’s router code into Huawei’s so it could easily steal Cisco customers seeking lower costs. The case was settled out of court.

But even Cisco, which has been doing business in mainland China since 1994, carefully refrained from criticizing Beijing. For instance, it stated a decade ago as it criticized Huawei, “We respect the efforts the Chinese government is making to increase intellectual property protection” and stressed that rather than there being any governmental strategy of economic aggression, “this dispute involved a very simple claim that one company used the other’s trade secrets and copyrighted materials without permission.”

In 2012, a congressional report found that Huawei’s equipment could be used by the regime in Beijing to spy on and even disrupt or cripple U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

Too many U.S. businesses seem more worried about being ridiculed for having an “inordinate fear of communism” than about China’s unhidden global designs. Last year, mainland Chinese buyers purchased roughly $6.1 billion in U.S. real estate, more than any other foreign buyer—much of it, as well as similar purchases in recent years, on farm and ranch land near U.S. military bases.

Whether Mayberry or Gotham, whether their wares are high tech or to be found in the soil and earth, U.S. companies can’t place savings before security when it comes to dealing with entities enthralled by our most threatening strategic adversary.

Huawei’s artificially low pricing was irresistible for many smaller U.S. telecom firms like Union.