US has underestimated Huawei, says founder

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/21/there-will-be-conflict-huawei-founder-says-us-underestimates-companys-strength

by howard941 • 7 years ago

91 121 7 years ago

theguardian.com

peteretep• 7 years ago

Well that sounds like a good way to calm any national security concerns tho

NDizzle• 7 years ago

Yep. Good luck, buddy.

b_tterc_p2• 7 years ago

This doesn’t make any sense. It’s kind of funny. His statements imply that he’ll show the US by still being a powerful business... but I don’t see how that changes anything about it’s relationship with the US?

I think he’s just putting on a strongman face because otherwise this is going to substantially weaken Huawei as a company.

StreamBright3• 7 years ago

Not to mention that Cisco and other networking equipment vendors benefit from the Huawei ban.

close044• 7 years ago

Make our backdoors great again...

For the eager downvoters out there, consider that (to my knowledge) no actual case for Huawei backdoors was made so far (although we can all be pretty sure they exist). At the same time Cisco routers giving root access with a specific private key is considered a simple "could happen to anyone" bug. So yes, it's what I said above: someone will have backdoors in the infrastructure. From US perspective it better be the home team.

FooBarWidget• 7 years ago

Huawei seems to see the US bans as a way to bully Huawei, and perhaps a way to bully China as well. Some of the Chinese people I know think that the US wants Chinese to stay poor, that the US is jealous of the Chinese's success. The press release is basically painting the story of the underdog resisting against bullies, and thriving against all odds.

space_fountain• 7 years ago

I definitely think some Americans have exactly that opinion.

bruinjoe• 7 years ago

Jelous? We've lost so many jobs due to free trade. They can call it any thing they want but the trade deficit cannot be explained by jelousy.

ASalazarMX• 7 years ago

Could this be an instance of "saving face" as people do in East Asia?

samsonradu• 7 years ago

Is “saving face” an (Eastern) Asia thing? (genuine question)

JumpCrisscross• 7 years ago

This is probably necessary for his political survival in China.

Huawei’s leadership bungled their position by overplaying their hand. Their mistakes have escalated into an international disagreement and a problem for Beijing. He needs to make sure sacrificing him is more costly than fighting Washington. Positioning himself with the public as a nationalistic martyr is one way to do that.

swordsmith• 7 years ago

Someone who reads between the lines

sehugg• 7 years ago

The relationship between Huawei and the Chinese government is a little blurry: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3372669

bjourne• 7 years ago

As is the relationship between the US government and The Trump Organization...

seanmcdirmid2• 7 years ago

Huawei's controlling ownership structure is opaque. They might be controlled by the PLA, or maybe just the Ren family by themselves. Employees get shares, but nothing in terms of controlling ownership, and it is all cashed out when they leave.

On the other hand, even if Huawei is controlled by the PLA, so what? They are under Chinese jurisdiction anyways, so the Chinese government could already do pretty much whatever it wanted to with it. The same for an American company under American jurisdiction.

addicted• 7 years ago

Well, to be fair to the founder, the US has already rolled back the restrictions it placed on Huawei, giving it a 90 day reprieve instead of imposing it immediately as they did earlier.

So clearly Huawei actually does have some leverage here that the US did not originally factor in.

That being said, I don’t see how it benefits Huawei for their founder to take this combative stance unless they think that the US is doing this solely to kneecap Huawei and there is no chance they will allow them to compete even if the allegations are proven untrue.

b_tterc_p2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure I would attribute that to Huawei leverage so much as US Telecoms depending on them in the short term and needing time to switch. But yeah.

xfs3• 7 years ago

I don’t see how it benefits Huawei for their founder to take this combative stance unless they think that the US is doing this solely to kneecap Huawei and there is no chance they will allow them to compete even if the allegations are proven untrue.

That's a strange position. Please help me understand.

The allegations are about national security threats. How does one prove his innocence in general? Huawei did what they can with the British by showing the source code and build processes, which was obviously far from enough. The US has gone out of its way to pressure its allies to ban Huawei, following a long and hard media campaign, ending with a deadly blow on Huaweis supply chain. The writing is on the wall. If the US is not doing this to cripple Huawei then what for?

majia4• 7 years ago

Huawei is not taking a combative stance. It’s just Guardian took a few out of context quotes to make him looks like combative.

ddoolin2• 7 years ago

Huawei and China will have a hard time finding any sympathy here, considering the companies they outright ban or block, or even just cut the legs off. Have any such US companies responded like this? It feels childish/immature to me, particularly given the circumstances & context.

impostir2• 7 years ago

I may be misinformed, but I have never heard of China specifically targeting 1 company like this. Sure, China blocks Facebook and Amazon, but its not a targeted hit. China blocks everyone. I am not claiming that this makes it fine, merely that it seems different.

k__2• 7 years ago

Doesn't it make China worse?

US bans a company because it's problematic, not because "It's part of the evil west"

seppin5• 7 years ago

distinction without a difference

usaar333• 7 years ago

China has definitely done targeted hits. Did you forget the GitHub DDOS in 2015?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/ddos-...

seanmcdirmid2• 7 years ago

China doesn't block Amazon, FYI.

No foreign company has enough exposure in China for China to destroy them.

BlackRing• 7 years ago

I agree. From another perspective, China has been a blatant power in the theft of IP from all over the world and we have been turning a blind eye to it for quite some time.

A lot of people joke about 'Chinese knockoffs' and the 'chinesium' metal alloys that permeate the knockoff/shoddy products but it has some serious problems.

This pushback is long overdue and frankly needed.

honeybee933• 7 years ago

Which foreign company has China destroyed using it's foreign policies? What China is doing is limit foreign company access to it's market. The equivalent would be US saying Huawei cannot sell in the US, which is totally fine. But this case is not. Huawei is stricted from doing business with any US entity. This order is essentially designed to completely destroy Huawei and damage Huawei in other countries whom might not side with the US or shares US concern. Keep in mind that in the situation where Huawei buys a component from a company not under US control, say a chip from TSMC, if said component contains any US IP or made component, Huawei still cannot buy it. In the world of technology, this is crippling. Regardless of which political camp people are on, I think this case demonstrates regardless how much US companies sell themselves as global and trusted, they are still US companies and beholden to US politics, and can be used as weapons in advancing US political agenda. Second, this also demonstrates as digital technology becomes as fundamental as electricity, water and air in each of the world's society, a lot of it is monopolized by the US and you are under the hands of the US to use said technology. I think it's very important for each Nation to develop it's own digital technology and true open source systema(hint Android for it to be truely useful is not as open as people think). I think technology people should focus on providing every person on Earth equal access to technology to improve everyone's lives.

holoduke• 7 years ago

Did you ever do business in China? I can tell from experience that doing business in China is much much harder than doing business in for example the US or EU. First of all you cannot do business in China without a local partner. Obtaining licenses in China requires bribery and is hardly possible. Copyright and trademarks are not respected. Copycats everywhere. Chinese legal support is hardly possible without having a Chinese passport. The list is endless. It is absolutely not a fair situation for US companies in China versus the other way around.

merhard• 7 years ago

Pelamis

ddoolin2• 7 years ago

I wasn't really asserting that the two were equal but that it likely will not be viewed as unequal by a layperson. Comparing just these two specific policies, maybe it is, but if you look at China's actions on a large scale, it changes the picture. The US, too.

tinza1232• 7 years ago

Did you even read the interview? Yeah China blocks many companies, but that's in CHINA, one market only. It never goes out of its way to try to strangle a company, forbids Chinese company to supply a foreign company downstream. You always have the options to not enter the Chinese market. Not in this case, that's not comparable at all.

strooper• 7 years ago

Sometimes it feels like the conflict is partially about the 5G technology implementation.

What does 5G technology have that is making everyone so sensitive? Will it require complete overhaul of the existing hardware (so big business opportunity)? Will it enable something extraordinary, apart from the data speed, that can not be done with the existing network technologies? I am curious...

bravo22• 7 years ago

Huawei sells 5G equipment. Think the equivalent of routers, switches but for cellular network. If they have backdoors then China can intercept and disrupt communication across many countries. That's the concern in a nutshell.

aiCeivi9• 7 years ago

They did the same with 3G/4G, they totally outpriced Nokia Siemens Networks. Why ban it now?

rtkwe• 7 years ago

Yeah the nightmare scenario goes a bit like: 1) Huawei's tech gets embedded deeply in US telecoms as 5G takes over as well as everyone claims it will and includes some buried controls mandated by the Chinese government 2) tensions between US and China inevitably come to a head over something 3) the Chinese government uses that backdoor to cripple US wireless networks 4) various sorts of hell break loose depending on how much 5G has supplanted other wireless industrial control solutions.

gscott• 7 years ago

Even something simpler as a command to shut down the equipment from remote at China's bidding.

notfromhere• 7 years ago

Needs new infrastructure, so its big spend. Plus whoever builds the physical network will inevitably have backdoors

creeble• 7 years ago

And much larger infrastructure at that. 5x or even 10x the number of current cell sites for 5G microcells.

Imagine the tracking opportunities!

stunt• 7 years ago

I believe it is more about money and power than being a security concern.

Huawei is becoming too powerful for US interests. 5G market makes them more powerful and gives them a better reputation as a high-tech company.

Killing it will pushes China’s tech many years back.

pishpash3• 7 years ago

It's a cold war, and just like the original Cold War, money and power is inextricable from security because the business of America is business.

mnl• 7 years ago

I don't understand why everybody is dismissing any chance of retaliation against for instance Apple. With this they're killing a major player outside China, that's about half of their smartphone sales ($52B revenue). I don't think China is going to take it just like that.

freeflight• 7 years ago

Because this is already framed as retaliation for "China being evil and stealing our jobs and IP".

So once the actual Chinese retaliation is gonna hit, it can be played up for full effect as "Look at what they are doing now! They never stop attacking us!" to further rile up the sentiments.

close044• 7 years ago

It probably won't be "retaliation" as people imagine it: the government stepping in and taking aim at Apple. Chinese consumers might decide (be encouraged) to buy more Huawei and less Apple. It can be something as indirect as making the US the devil on every possible channel or as direct as including a "patriotic" point in their scoring systems. There's a myriad of ways China could hit at Apple or other US companies without the government directly executing them.

treis• 7 years ago

Retaliating against Apple hits China as well since Apple's products are manufactured/assembled there. China has a tightrope to walk here. Companies like Apple can shift their manufacturing to different countries and likely will if China comes down too harshly on them.

rchaud• 7 years ago

Retaliating against Apple would spook governments of other countries that are still planning to proceed with Huawei's 5G equipment. I think Huawei is betting that this is more political theater from Trump, and can be resolved with a token gesture that lets the Pres declare the outcome as a win for him personally.

sjg0072• 7 years ago

You can reverse the situation. Would China hypothetically allow Qualcomm, Cisco deployments for their 5g networks? Even with encryption there is a lot to learn from the metadata and as we really accelerate to IoTs potential for major economic disruption.

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure they did in the past. Not as sure now.

jorblumesea• 7 years ago

Sure, after turning over any IP and source code and being installed in a few token places. Hardly any kind of real adoption, more like a forced IP transfer.

Merkur• 7 years ago

It would be ok if America would ban Huawei from building national infrastructure - it wouldn’t be very capitalistic tho.

But it is down right evil to impose extraterritorial sanctions against a company and preventing other to do business with them.

sjg0072• 7 years ago

I think it is a national security argument which basically means the 5 eyes countries have to follow suit.

chirau• 7 years ago

China has a club of rich and powerful people. This guy is one of them, he is in it and obviously has friends in high places. I wouldn't be surprised if China decides to either ban or raise taxes on companies like Apple. At the end of the day, China does have some leverage on US manufacturing. This is no longer just Huawei. It's pretty much China versus USA. The challenger versus the incumbent.

siffland• 7 years ago

“We can also make the same chips as the US chips, but it doesn’t mean we won’t buy them.”

Does that mean they are going to steal IP and pirate it? Yes a silly question because i don't know what chips they are and who holds the IP for them, but did he just say we don't care we will just steal your stuff and make it ourselves?

majia4• 7 years ago

This is really a misleading interpretation. In the original context, he meant Huawei will buy products regardless if they are made by Chinese or US suppliers. One doesn’t need to trust everything Huawei claims, but taking quotes without proper context doesn’t help the discussion.

bertomartin• 7 years ago

I can understand why the US wouldn't want them to build out the 5G network in the US, but it's kinda overstepping to push other countries to deny them that access. That's for other countries to decide on their own. In addition, deeming the company a national security risk is kinda ridiculous. and blocking companies in the US from selling to them or doing business with them is simply anti-competitive obviously. I feel like the result will be huawei developing their own homegrown technology and bringing even more competition to US companies. It's obviou s they're capable of developing advanced tech w/o simply copying (I mean they're ahead in 5G). And once they go down that route there's no coming back because they wouldn't wanna make the same mistake twice. can't understand the strategy by this admin., seems kinda dumb to me

bitbrewer• 7 years ago

Right on spot.

suff• 7 years ago

Who do you work for?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/20/18508915/cia-huawei-china...

EastToWest3• 7 years ago

Good job on picking one sentence in a 150-minute interview to serve an agenda. No wonder people here say "This doesn't make any sense" -- because it doesn't.

The actual interview contains a lot more information. For example, Ren urged people to not go overly nationalistic, thanked companies in the US for working together, urged people to not blame US companies, explained his thought in detail on recent events, how to attract talents etc.

EastToWest3• 7 years ago

Found a transcript (in Chinese) if people are interested.

Warning: very long text -- 20,000 characters in length.

https://m.huxiu.com/article/300415.html

pnathan• 7 years ago

Is there a decent translation in English available?

majia4• 7 years ago

Right after saying “there will be conflict”, Ren said China and the US will eventually hug each other on the “summit of technology” and make contributions to the humanity together.

throwaway_ndiuf• 7 years ago

I don't want to sound overly pessimistic here, but in my personal experience companies from second and third-world seem to have learned expertly how to exploit the "humanity" angle to outsiders while secretly exploiting their workers internally.

Can't say I see this in black and white necessarily, but I strongly suspect these companies (conglomerates of 2nd and 3rd world countries especially, and even their governments) realize this is the vocabulary of the 21st century and are using this to try to continue marketing themselves.

EDIT: In no way do I think first-world companies / countries are pure. I just notice this and its impact far more with respect to 2nd and 3rd world.

abakus• 7 years ago

Just FYI:

Huawei is one of the first companies that promoted the "996" schedule. https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU

Huawei started the trend of laying off engineers once they reach 35 years old in China.

mensetmanusman2• 7 years ago

They also recently had an internal bounty program that gave workers promotions/bonuses for any internal trade secrets/inventions they could acquire from western technology companies. That’s the spirit!

impostir2• 7 years ago

Isn't this just the ZTE ban all over again? Trump seems to completely believe that China owns these companies, so targeting the companies becomes a legitimate strategy in his trade war. I would be surprised if any Chinese company was completely free from Party control, but that doesn't intrinsically justify the ban. I would also be surprised if any American tech company was completely free from NSA influence. I will be surprised if the ban lasts, but it has already hurt US credibility as a reasonable trade partner.

fspeech2• 7 years ago

Not sure why the Guardian only picked parts to make him sound as inflammatory as possible. What about honestly reporting that his saying that his daughter uses Apple and he wants her to have the choice and people should not be too nationalistic about it. What about his profusely praising his US suppliers and consultants for helping him succeed. His overall tone is fairly noncombatative given the circumstances. Here is a transcript https://m.huxiu.com/article/300415.html

fspeech2• 7 years ago

He said at one time they signed the deal to sell Huawei to a US company (Motorola, I believe) and were waiting for the buyer’s board to approve the deal. He said they wanted to succeed as a US company (“wearing cowboy hats” in his words). After the deal fell through, his younger colleagues voted to not try to find another buyer. He warned his younger colleagues then that there would be conflict with US if they succeeded too well. Interesting tidbits.

jiveturkey• 7 years ago

Not sure why

really?

Animats• 7 years ago

It's like being hit with "national security letters" in the US. You can't talk about them and may have to spy on your customers. Huawei gets no benefit from putting surveillance features in their gear. It's something they're required to do.

It's been a long time since US telcos could build or buy switches with no surveillance features. All the way through 1ESS, no Western Electric switch had built-in surveillance. People had to go into the central office and hook up wires to listen in.

dirkg• 7 years ago

The US is doing what it does so well, acting as a bully and using its economic/military status to abuse its power.

The whole thing is total hypocrisy - the US spies/steals from other countries as a matter of policy and we spend trillions on it, but its ok because we're the 'good' guys. China is becoming a threat so any means must be used to suppress them, since we can't very well invade China like we do weaker countries.

what exactly has Huawei done which is so bad anyway? Any why should anyone trust the US govt, esp this govt?

mizchief2• 7 years ago

I wasn't really on board with banning Huawei until I read this article.

US has underestimated Huawei, says founder

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