OPINION:
China’s national telecom champion, Huawei, is also Beijing’s most accomplished intellectual property thief. Today, Huawei is also the tip of a Chinese spear about to skewer Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook.
In the Trump administration, I was heavily involved in efforts to neutralize the Huawei threat. The best we could do, however, was to cut off at least some of the company’s chip supply so that Huawei handsets wouldn’t be the mobile phone of choice worldwide.
Unfortunately, Huawei continues to operate on the existential threat cusp of consolidating global control of 5G, one of the most powerful civilian and military technologies in history.
If you can hear me now and are in the middle of just about nowhere, your phone is probably connected to at least a 4G network. 5G is 4G on rocket fuel; its dramatic increase in speed and capacity suggests more of a revolution than evolution.
This is a dangerous revolution: 5G is not just a way to make lightning-fast, drop-free phone calls. It can seamlessly interconnect both people and machines in ways that will lead to a dramatic increase not just in productivity but also in dangerous cyber vulnerabilities and military lethality.
To be macabrely specific here, imagine China using Huawei’s 5G networks to turn off U.S. electricity grids and transportation systems — or to make U.S. Air Force planes drop from the skies over the Taiwan Strait — and you get the existential threat picture.
You don’t need a classified briefing — although I had plenty of those on 5G — to understand the pitfalls of allowing a Chinese state-directed company like Huawei to seize the commanding heights of 5G. And when I say “commanding heights,” I’m referring to Huawei’s global strategy to be the technology and network of choice for the communication networks of every country in the world — from the salons of Europe and flyover country of America to the teeming cities of Africa and Asia.
Now comes the twin news that Huawei has not only successfully avoided U.S. export sanctions with cutting-edge American technology in its latest phone model, but the Chinese government has also launched a multipronged offensive to get Chinese consumers to turn in their iPhones in exchange for Huawei’s new model.
If the words “Tim Cook, I told you so” roll over the tip of my tongue, please forgive me. But I’ve been warning useful China idiot CEOs like Mr. Cook for almost two decades that the risk of going to China to leverage its sweatshops is to first lose your technology and then your entire company.
Don’t believe me? Just read China’s five- and 10-year plans. They read like a high-tech Stephen King horror novel designed to keep American executives sleepless in Shanghai.
To wit: China’s avowed goal is to absorb, assimilate and digest foreign technologies in ways that will breed national champions like Huawei over time and weed out foreign devils like Apple.
I remember clearly a conversation I had years ago with then-General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt on the floor of the stock exchange. I warned him that if he manufactured sophisticated technologies like jet engines in China, Chinese spies would steal GE’s secrets, turn them over to Chinese aircraft manufacturers, and reduce GE to the rubble it is today.
Today, Apple is poised to be just one more victim of Chinese mercantilism. it is only a matter of time before Chinese consumers completely switch to Huawei. And why shouldn’t they? Huawei has stolen virtually every part of the iPhone design, so functionally, Huawei phones are nearly identical — just a lot cheaper.
It is also just a matter of a little more time before Chinese manufacturers move into Apple’s China factories as Apple beats its retreat.
Of course, the next big American icon on China’s list will be Elon Musk’s Tesla. Mr. Musk has built the largest electric vehicle plant in the world in Shanghai; Chinese financing is now the only thing really keeping Mr. Musk’s Tesla house of cards financially afloat, and it’s only a matter of time before his big bet goes bad.
Here, history can be a harsh mistress: Just as Henry Ford’s plants in Nazi Germany were seized to support Hitler’s efforts at world dominance in the 1930s, Mr. Musk’s gleaming assembly lines are destined to be confiscated a nanosecond after Xi Jinping orders the invasion of Taiwan.
It’s not too late to bring American companies home. It’s not too late to ensure that any new factories are built on American soil. That’s what we tried to do in the Trump administration under Trump’s two simple rules: “Buy American, hire American.”
That’s what the White House under President Biden should do now rather than kowtowing to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Instead, Mr. Biden is inexplicably throwing a lifeline to the struggling Chinese economy.
Foolish is as foolish does. Or maybe the kid from Scranton really did sell us out to the Chinese, as Hunter Biden’s laptop suggests.
Just saying.
• Peter Navarro served in the Trump White House as manufacturing czar, chief China strategist and pandemic quartermaster. This column originally appeared at www.peternavarro.substack.com.
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