China’s Telecom Giants Are a Threat to Our Security

China has used open-source intelligence to gain a significant information edge over Western countries.

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The mood between Washington and Beijing is deteriorating—again. The United States and some of its allies announced a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over China’s human rights abuses. This comes just weeks after the somewhat reconciliatory virtual meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping and about two months after the swap of a Huawei Technologies executive detained on U.S. charges in Canada for two Canadian hostages held by China.

U.S.-China relations are volatile for a number of reasons, but policymakers in Washington should not be distracted from a very  specific challenge: Beijing’s technology champions, especially telecommunications companies like Huawei, whose willingness to help surveil Chinese and foreign populations continues to come to light. The information age in which we live will only exacerbate the security threats they pose. Allied democracies should continue to put their foot down on China’s telecom heavyweights.

At the center of the fight is 5G equipment, which will power our next-generation wireless networks. Despite recent sanctions by the West, Huawei still maintains a solid lead in the global market for 5G equipment. As our day-to-day lives increasingly rely on the virtual world—from smartwatches to home assistants and Wi-Fi-enabled cars—a dominance in hardware infrastructure may open the door to the control and manipulation of the information that flows through it.

The concern is not only that the Chinese government could use its tech giants like Huawei and ZTE to spy on consumers—though it could, warned officials in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. It’s also that aggregated information from individual consumers on the internet could mean invaluable intelligence for China and compromise the security of America and its allies.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Victor B

    Intelligence collection is embedded in nearly everything China does. Even those Chinese merchant ships anchored offshore are potential electronic warfare platforms.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    I’m a free trade guy but as a consumer I do not want to support these companies in any way and I’ll try to go out of my way in the future to avoid doing business with companies that are involved with the Chinese government.

    My initial reaction is that the whole idea of the future being wired is a choice. I have/had Strava and never connected my watch so it doesn’t have data on my runs. I don’t see anything wrong with a “dumb” fridge and have no interest in a “smart” one. Etc. If people don’t want “smart” devices snooping on them… don’t buy them, especially from China.

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  3. Laura Crowder

    "What does a Fitbit have to do with national security?" You never answered that question. YOu went on to discuss the Strava app, which is on my fitbit (but never used), but also available on android and apple. So why call out fitbit specifically when applewatch and gwear watches (and phones) would do exactly the same thing?

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  4. Avatar photo
    Ed P

    Trump had exactly one decent position - that our relationship with China is toxic and needs serious reform.

    He just went about it exactly wrong, could not formulate an appropriate policy

    We thought we could drag China into human rights with free trade but Mr Ross Perot had some good points we ignored. Free trade with autocracies was a bad idea. We sold ourselves on this notion, after we has defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, that a prosperous middle class in China would demand incremental democratic reforms and end communism.

    But alas, decades later the CCP has only been greatly rewarded and enriched, tightened its grip against any Chinese dissent, engaged in genocide with the Uigers, and subsumed Hong Kong. Now they threaten Taiwan more directly than ever. Our central thesis to justifying this new trade relationship has been proven to be wrong and we need to correct this.

    Doing business on a level playing field with people that cannot be held accountable is not possible. We should not attempt it, rather build in barriers to trade.

    And we cannot forget that one of our critical asymmetrical resources here in the free world is our broadly shared prosperity and the rich reservoirs of consumer demand they entail. It was critical to our Cold War success against Russia. But we’ve allowed China to suckle on that precious resource and grow fat. They are flattening this asymmetry with a growing middle class. We need to act if quickly to reverse this mistake and isolate them. Or else they will have demonstrated to the world that modern development is possible without freedoms and human rights. Perhaps even more than possible, that human rights and freedoms are an impediment to development, will be what these goons try to sell to the world, if we do not guard ourselves better.

    It will not be easy especially as global tensions mounts surrounding these territorial conflicts of autocratic powers threatening their free neighbors. But we’d better start acting.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Chris L

    The idea of "private" companies in China is laughable on its face. Remember that all companies in China, especially the state-designated monopolies, are required to turn over all control and information to the government as part of their license to operate upon request, whether in part or in whole. Few wanted to believe it when this was first publicized, but now Xi is gobbling up all these companies through rapacious fines for fictional violations (since he needs to continue to update his military ahead of planned advances despite their economic downturns), so he's exposing himself on this, face-saving be damned. It's only a matter of time before CCP takes over Huawei suddenly and completely to root everyone's networks ahead of their Taiwan invasion.

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    1. Avatar photo
      David Chen

      I remember this pudgy white guy on LinkedIn posting about how you just need to love China and China will love you back. I suddenly felt a spiritual kinship with all the Cuban exiles who have to listen to Bernie and kin fawn over Castro.

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