If true, this is certainly a nuclear move. There's a variety of first party app stores in China, though I doubt they'll see much success convincing Western users to switch. Curious if there's going to be antitrust fallout from markets outside the US for unilaterally crippling vendors at behest of US foreign policy. Is Microsoft or Apple going to pull their app stores as well? What happened to project Dragon Fly?
On the other hand, I wonder how Huawei / China will retaliate. Wouldn't be surprised if this kills all Google manufacturing prospects in China which pretty much kills Google hardware.
It's a bit of a reminder that Google is under US jurisdiction and there's a point to be made that, no matter what they promise you, if the US wants their data, they get their data.
More competition can only be good, if this leads to the Chinese creating a third major platform, I welcome it. If they open source it, they may even have success outside of China.
If you’re Chinese, having another domestic platform is a good and important thing towards self determination. Not so great if you’re American, as they’re playing for winner-takes-all.
"is a good and important thing towards self determination"
This is a lark?
The only thing the CPC is interested in is total and absolute control of the citizenry.
They'd love to have a platform for which they didn't have to monitor with gazillions of staff, and have police on corners to ensure 'government monitoring' is properly installed.
Imagine if the CPC could ensure total thought control without all the overhead?
That is exactly the objective.
There's nothing stopping 1 billion people from developing a mobile platform - or any kind of platform for that matter in 2019.
They can do it now. Or yesterday.
And the 'whole world' could be using it.
Consider for a moment why it's not happening?
Why isn't the entire world using software or hosted solutions for all of our SaaS needs in India and China?
Given that the existential nature of the Chinese economy is intertwined with the CPC, I don't think any good will come of this.
A lot of the comments and thinking abound 'trade with China' are centered around a view that it's a normal economy, but it isn't, so the regular rules don't quite apply.
In the grand grand scheme of things, Huawei is a small thing, we're seeing a realignment of forces given the new reality of China's competitive powers, irrespective of anything else.
It's hard to say where the new equilibrium will land.
> Why isn't the entire world using software or hosted solutions for all of our SaaS needs in India and China?
Because the tech has been developed in the US, and the US has lead in it ever since.
> Given that the existential nature of the Chinese economy is intertwined with the CPC, I don't think any good will come of this.
I mean, the article being discussed here shows that US corporations are tools of US foreign policy. Yes, it's a different style of control, but it's control nonetheless.
And before the notorious flaggers run wild: I don't like the Chinese model. I don't particularly like the US model either though. I'm not judging those that profit from it for also liking it. I'm sure I would, too.
Maybe. I'd prefer that neither of them have my data.
I do believe that competition limits the exploits. If there's an alternative, you have to fear losing your customers (and their money), so you limit what you do to them. If there isn't any, why would you? Right now, the competition is basically only Apple vs Google. Both USA, both from California. A bit more diversity would be nice.
Yeah, too bad FirefoxOS never made it too far. Unfortunately, it would still be only "kind of" competition: still US-based, still in California, still financed & owned by the same (group of) people.
I'd love some real competition. Chinese, Russian, European alternatives. I would have a hard time trusting Chinese or Russian systems, maybe rightfully, maybe because decades of Propaganda have taken their toll. I'd still like to see them.
Neither can be trusted to retain a glass of water, let alone personally identifying information that can spur advertising campaigns and sway elections in countries around the world.
I think much of that hardware is rebranded OEM anyways, which should be safe. It also isn’t clear China would blame google for this, or if its any worse than how google has pissed the Chinese government off in the past. Maybe they’ll just block google websites...wait no, they’ve done that already.
Surely it doesn't matter if China blame Google. USA have gone after Huawei based on Huawei being Chinese, so the response of China to stop manufacturing stuff for USA companies would seem reasonable, no?
Is this a "force people to buy USA manufactured goods; but blame it on the Chinese" attempt?
People used to blame Toyota for Japan actions, but that kind of sentiment lasts for 5 minutes, and anyways, those Toyotas were mostly made in China anyways.
Likewise, Google has almost zero consumer exposure in China, so all they can do is interrupt their ability to give Chinese companies money for goods and services, which seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The Chinese government doesn't want the west to grow new supply chains and find new manufacturing centers just because of one trade war, it wouldn't be according to their goals.
The biggest threat to Google in my opinion would be the possibility that Huawei and China could try to "steal" Android from them.
Imagine in 2021 the Chinese government mandates that every Chinese smartphone manufacturer needs to switch to ChAndroid for all of their product lines, with a single unified app store, whether they sell the phones inside or outside of China. Well, fully half of the top smartphone companies in the world are Chinese. So all of a sudden Google would lose the ability to monetize on almost half of the ecosystem.
And if it were open and successful, other Android manufacturers could move over. Samsung would LOVE the ability to get a piece of the search and app revenue on every one of their phones. Right now they're locked out because of Google's licensing agreement for Android, but they must look at how much money Google pays Apple every year to be the default search provider very longingly.
Open in this case meaning open source and open to other people to modify/build upon, like Android is currently. But you're right that the Chinese bureaucracy may not be nimble enough for this kind of move, and might stillborn it by mucking it up with poor decisions.
Correct. So manufacturers should be allowed to sell Android and "Android-compatible" phones simultaneously, whereas before Google forced manufacturers to choose either/or. But that decision is still under appeal as far as I can tell. It also doesn't remove the technical/marketing/user hurdles of getting everyone to port their software over to new APIs, a new app store, and getting the users to get comfortable with a whole new app store and none of the Google apps they expect (like Google Maps, GMail, etc.)
Android is open source, these vendors are free to fork and do whatever.
The lion's haul for Google is not 'app store sales' in China , it's search.
Android is not about App Store, that's just a marginal thing - it's about owning and controlling search everywhere. It's a means to extend their primary product.
Samsung can make it's own app store tomorrow, but they're not going to get 'Google Search' - which is what people want - so they'll have to do for now.
As far as Huawei ... well, open trade can only be had by like economies. If one economy can externalize pollution, labour costs, healthcare, and the other can't - then there cannot be open trade. Same thing for more contentious issues such as IP theft, foreign ownership rules, capital controls, state control of enterprises.
Huawei is the example, the tip of the spear. It hardly even matters what the degree of materiality is, that said, there should be not question that there's existential risk with Huawei. The CCP can require Huawei to do whatever, at any time, and Huawei will happily comply.
China can't enjoy the advantages of a 'developing economy' while trying to put 1st tier industries form advanced economies out of business, it's not going to sit well.
So we saw the big rise of China, now they're slowing down to 'nice growth' instead of crazy growth, they're grabbing land and industry so the West is wary. Meaning the trade rules will change.
The internet, at least as we knew it, is dead. What we have now is a highly segemented, highly federated, highly monitored, centralized communication network. The walls and the controls around access are getting more intricate every day, we've long ago left the idea of an open network in the trash can.
It sure seems like the future is more and more walls, more and more reactionary defensive measures. Nobody seems to have any inclination to resist this trend.
For instance gdpr, copyright directive, tax laws (was a story the other day about you having to comply with a lot of local tax laws - consider what happens if you are unable or unwilling to comply with 1000s of special snowflake tax rules, presumably the authority rests on blocking).
These examples are not quite freedom of speech, but will lead to a breaking apart of the internet all the same.
Of course, that's China's goal for their 2025 project right? It seems Americans are underestimating the long-term plans and strategies of countries that deny liberal democratic principles.
> though I doubt they'll see much success convincing Western users to switch.
Are any of these stores near the quality levels that Western audiences expect? My experience with software from China was consistently bad. Even the AliExpress web site looks like a cobbled together, barely working mess that people only put up with because of the low prices of the goods you can buy there, which won't work for app stores.
It's because they were literally blacklisted by the US government. As other comments say, all companies in the US will do the same, it's not about Google, as much as the article tries to make it about Google
Or they did the same thing every US company will have to do thanks to the blacklist.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-huaweitech/chin...
>>The U.S. Commerce Department said on Wednesday it is adding Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and 70 affiliates to its so-called “Entity List” - a move that bans the telecom giant from buying parts and components from U.S. companies without U.S. government approval.
Otherwise, the article is good for showing the extent of the political situation.
One might be able to stretch this to 'US aids potential cyber attacks in China' since phones in China might no longer receive security updates in Android.
Will I, as a European customer of Huawei, still get app updates from Google Play and push messages via firebase cloud messaging? Without the Google framework my phone is a brick...
WhatsApp and signal work fine without GCM/FCM, dunno about other apps but WhatsApp it's international standard so you are fine
you can get updates through their own app store AppGallery, but your paid apps are paid through Google, so don't expect them in order store, tying your money to Google ecosystem was bad idea in first place
Don't phones in China already not use proprietary Google stuff? The cyber attacks being aided here are surely on Huawei owners outside of China (US/Europe mostly I expect?) where their phone shipped with Google Play and could get Google updates/other services?
Not every US company already makes business with Huawei - so in that case they wouldn't have to stop selling/buying things, because they never started. E.g. is Microsoft, Apple or Amazon impacted?
>"There should be a wide list of companies to whom this applies now." //
I assumed the "this" was "the USA's trade blacklist". The blacklist applies to all companies AFAICT, though you are right it will probably only affect a small proportion.
Though any USA based company may have bought a Huawei phone, router, or similar, and presumably will not be allowed by law to do so henceforth?
Not sure how things like peering with a company that uses Huawei kit, or something, would work. How deep does it go? Can you buy phone service in countries where the phone supplier has Huawei base stations?
No. Although Huawei did do some shady shit, like come up with a bonus scheme based on how much IP/market intelligence their employees could "acquire" from their competitors.
I'd hardly presume Huawei is a front for a foreign intelligence service, but their software for cellular basestations is extremely vulnerable (hundreds of different vulnerable versions of OpenSSL sprinkled through) and they still can't be bothered to use version control, despite committing to address both issues back in 2012: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-huawei-bri...
Huawei's products are vulnerable by default, anyone can look up the applicable CVEs and run the proof of concept code for said CVE to pop a shell. China doesn't have exclusive access :)
No, I think it is, that would explain a lot of things - like how can they make/sell premium mobile phones for less? If the Chinese govt is paying you (say) $100/user to plant a back door, that would certainly help.
Remember that Huawei settled out of court to the 'allegation' that they copied Cisco's source code.
American-manufactured devices are probably equally as infiltrated by American foreign intelligence services. Hence why they don't just use a standard Linux distro with open source firmware.
US government spying has nothing to do with why manufacturers don’t “just use a standard Linux distro with open source firmware”. There are no GNU/Linux (as in, with the GNU userland) distros that work well enough on phones to compete with Android and open source firmware removes some competitive advantage around things like image processing.
Even if it was true that American phone companies are infiltrated by American intelligence services, you have to ask yourself which government you trust more. As a New Zealander, I think there are very good reasons to trust the US government a lot more.
Heck, if you look at where Chinese officials try to stash their money and their families, it's clear they trust Western countries a lot more too.
> As a New Zealander, I think there are very good reasons to trust the US government a lot more.
As an EU citizen, idk, China seems more locally focused, the U.S reaches everywhere. Speaking of NZ, the whole Kim Dotcom situation makes it look like a U.S.vassal state, honestly.
Hardly, look at what the Chinese are doing in Africa and the "Silk Road" initiative and how they load down countries with borrowing so they can come in and clean up 10 years later.
Google have no choice but to comply with US law. This is now going to make a load of existing US owned (Huawei manufactured) devices less secure unless an exemption is agreed for things like software security updates.
Not only that, the ban encourages a long term move away from US-based tech as alternatives are needed within China. This new tech will ultimately be available worldwide, but no longer owned or controlled by US companies.
As someone from neither China or US, it seems crazy. It’s one thing to ban Huawei from your own markets for security concerns, but by making such a heavy handed ban on working with them, the US government seem to be making the US less secure short term, but also US companies will be less competitive and less influential in the world long term.
> the ban encourages a long term move away from US-based tech as alternatives are needed within China.
China blocked Google play years ago and repeatedly blocks every attempt Google tries to make to relaunch back into china [0] so they did that a long time ago.
Like they have no choice with tax laws. Or no choice with cartel laws. Or no choice with data protection laws.
They are agressively trying to circumvent many laws all the times to extend their monopoly and grow their profits. They have multi-billion fines from the EU and several member states pending and no somewhat critical thinking citizen would claim that EU has been particularly tough on their monopoly and tax evasions.
Well, OS updates weren't going through the play store anyway, no? And it appears you'll continue to be able to download app updates via the play store "But users of existing Huawei devices who have access to the Google Play Store will still be able to download app updates provided by Google.".
Well, Android is opensource so they will be able to just run it, but without that google crap such as gmail, maps, assistant, etc... Which sounds like a good thing to me. I'll try to buy a new Huawei phone soon.
Huawei being a Chinese company are perfectly content with spying on you without Google trying to interfere. Be prepared in a few years when certain network requests just fail, like trying to send a comment mentioning 996.icu.
To be fair, Apple has been fighting tooth and nail against the FBI decrypting their phones.
Huawei, ZTE and consorts are literally owned by PRC cadre and are actively involved in infrastructure to spy on and terrorize minority groups in China, as well as getting caught spying and stealing IP abroad.
I think there is no need to answer each post with Whataboutism, especially when the comparision is to tilted against Chinese companies.
>Apple has been fighting tooth and nail against the FBI decrypting their phones //
The problem is, for me, it's impossible to know if that's true or if that's the external appearance that's been designed. Nearly everyone in Apple wouldn't know either. Legally, it seems, NSA letters could force such a situation.
AIR the much publicised event of 'FBI wanted to open someone's phone and Apple wouldn't' ultimately ended in a third party enabling it. So, this could easily have gone down that Apple said "we can't do that because it will kill our privacy angle in the market" and the FBI say "well just pass on the info to this third party" [eg some key needed to sign updates; or an update that decrypts all internal memories and dumps them to a port on boot, or whatever].
That's entirely undiscoverable and serves the interest of both FBI and Apple, FBI ideally want to have "backdoors" where it's publicly known "there is no backdoor".
Heh, there will be a rude awakening when they try AOSP or the open-source Android.. "wait, it doesn't have a launcher?"
No, seriously, AOSP is very far from useful. That's before you consider that to run Android on any sort of recent hardware, you need manufacturer support from the chips you are using, which you can't get if you are barred from trade with them.
If this also revokes the GMS agreements, it will have a much larger impact than the updates part.
A whole lot of things on Android are dependant on the GMS, such as push notifications for certain apps, cloud storage of user data, and a lot more.
Let's see where the it all ends up, but this may turn to be an enormous crippling move for Android on Huawei/Honor devices.
considering Huawei, xiaomi, BBK, lenorola control majority of market everywhere outside US one would say it's quite opposite, they just need to convince Samsung to join them and Google with their Google play services it's past and they can keep their small market with their pixel phones thinking about their importance and that devs charging 30% it's moral
They appear to be working hard on having it blacklisted in the UK AFAICT. BBC Click did a report and a guy from GCHQ basically said "it's not a problem" whilst there seems to be a deal of press trying to push the political angle to make it politically expedient -- I can only assume that's a propaganda attempt by USA?
I'm surprised that Huawei is such a threat to USA industry to be honest.
Perhaps Trump's team has shares in their opposition, or was trying to short them?
In Germany it was in the news that US hinted that if we wouldn't participate in banning Huawei we are excluded from further sharing of intelligence and stuff like this. For 5G and T-Mobile i.e. Deutsche Telekom AG they basically said: Dare to buy Huawai and you gonna have a bad time.
It's these liberal and western high ethics at work here...
Project is so European it goes against interests of 1/3 EU: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Croatia. Its not "EU buy gas from wherever we want", Its Germany making deals with Russia once again, remember Ribbentrop/Molotov? Russia is already hard at work making you forget https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-after-russian-pr..., buying gas from Russia while bypassing other EU member states.
All I know about Huawei is that they produced what seemed like at least half of welfware phones—the kind available to anybody on most any kind of welfare, including EBT—and these phones were utter garbage. Reasonably, one could say they had ripped off the government, these phones were such crap. Screen a .5mm pane of brittle glass that a tap could break. Barely ran android, laden with crapware, basically needed to be plugged into a power source at all times. Some you couldn't get the SIM card out, like to put in your late model Samsung Galaxy. Pure garbage, yet the welfare service the phones are supposed to support is extremely valuable to a lot of people.
Lol, yes the economic conditions with China previous to the current administration were oh so free. Unless you were Google or Facebook and wanted to run a website in China. Or you were a manufacturer and wanted to manufacture in China without transferring all of your IP to a state-owned JV partner.
I'm not sure why this is being voted down. I'll take a well-known Hong Kong newspaper (in this case the South China Morning Post) over a tech blog re-writing other people's journalism any day.
They're the source for the Engadget article, so still a better choice in any case. The change in ownership also hasn't affected the quality of their reporting, as far as I can tell.
I was just reiterating the comment, it was hidden. Also kinda silly for you to say so definitively that being owned by what is effectively a state venture of the PRC doesn't have an effect on their reporting. I wouldn't say that about basically any news outlet, because they all at least have a headquarters somewhere.
And given the PRC's enormous, well-documented investments into perverting the truth and framing the narrative worldwide, more developed than most; even an arm's length relationship is too close for me to put that sort of trust into a a venture like this.
Huawei still uses outdated, insecure versions of OpenSSL through their basestation code, and has successfully avoided using version control despite promising to address both issues back in 2012. This seems like an optimal environment to engineer an optimized version of Linux!
At what point does China just develop its own mobile OS?
There seems value in just taking the reigns, and making whatever you create open-source, so that ZTE and all the other Chinese manufacturers can use it as well.
Its certainly a major blow to the value of Huawei phones.
Not just mobile... Huawei also makes really nice laptops and presumably MS/Intel are under the same obligation to sever relations with Huawei. Unless Huawei is going to make a huge retreat we might see a full on effort for a new OS that covers both usecases?
My guess is that they'll probably just sell off / kill off their computer business. It's not a huge money maker for them, and trying to switch people off Windows is super hard.
Even if they develop a mobile OS, will it be the quality and usefulness of Google services? Android is just linux + google services. Without those, it's hard to make the sell to western audiences, at least.
Google Maps is a masterpiece of engineering and it's hard to imagine that Huawei will be able to compete, near term. If I'm reading the situation right, this might mean the end of Huawei in the western phone market unless something changes.
You can’t really use Google Maps in China. Even over VPN it’s outdated and often displays the wrong location due to the GPS scrambling that the government enforces on maps.
Baidu Maps is very good though, I would even say on par with Google Maps and better in some areas. It does however have more obvious ads which is annoying.
Huawei's market is international as well as domestic. Western users are used to Google services. So while they can work around the issue for Chinese users, they basically lose the western market. Who wants Android without the spectrum Google-like services?
You're too biased to see that Google is not actually indispensable. Chinese users don't see Google as indispensable obviously, and provided a choice, others may see it too.
I can't see any Chinese phone company feeling comfortable with this move. If someone sets up a viable non-US alternative to Android and the Play Store, they could jump ship en masse.
Lineage isn't good enough on its own. 99% of Lineage OS users also install google play services and the google play store. You need to have a replacement for all of the closed source Google APIs for app developers to use. It's a much bigger undertaking than just recompiling the base OS from source.
Look at the PocketCHIP and OrangePi boards. Allwinner's chips can run Xorg, Wayland, do gigabit ethernet, handle eMMC using mainline Linux all without any proprietary firmware or closed source software.
You can install F-Droid or microG if you prefer; you don't need to use GApps.
Apart from that the other options you have, are (in random order): /e/, PureOS, KaiOS, SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, postmarketOS, among others.
I looked at MicroG and saw this almost immediately: This is alpha-grade software and not yet ready for production use. Do not use if you don't know what you're doing.
That's not going to be good enough for Huawei.
Similarly, all of those alternative OSes aren't going to work if they're not binary, and more importantly API compatible with Android + GMS.
The question is rather: given that it is FOSS is it good enough for them to extend the functionality on the short-term?
> Similarly, all of those alternative OSes aren't going to work if they're not binary, and more importantly API compatible with Android + GMS.
KaiOS has some compatibility (by design not fully compatible).
SailfishOS has an Android emulator. Other OSes could also use one such as Anbox.
/e/ and LineageOS are binary and API compatible with Android.
GMS is an issue, but given that Google is under a magnifying glass concerning monopoly position related to Android in EU I have some hope that alternatives for GMS (or FOSS implementations) could happen.
Huawei and Honor stopped providing bootloader unlock codes last year [1]. Wouldn't this make it impossible to install Lineage OS or another AOSP-based custom ROM?
Huawei phones have locked bootloaders and you can't fet the unlock key from them (there are potentially questionable 3rd party sites selling those, turning this into a market..)
If you do unlock the device and install Lineage OS (which doesn't support more than a few devices), you now basically have a crappy camera app, probably your FreeBuds won't work properly anymore and you really should have bought a different phone.
I love Lineage OS and used it for years (OPO and other phones). It would ruin my P30P though.
I'm sure one does but I don't know for certain. The difficulty comes in replacing the Google Services functionality. I suspect this responsibility could be pushed upstream into frameworks.
Yes, since each of Chinese android vendors(Huawei/Xiaomi/Oppo/Oneplus...) has their own "Google Play" alternative in China. Their are plenty of tools for uploading apps to each of these markets.
> Huawei Technologies Co Ltd will immediately lose access to updates to the Android operating system
Android security updates are part of AOSP [0]. The article explicitly mentions that Huawei still has access to Google’s OSS stuff. And besides, they couldn’t really block Huawei from accessing open-source stuff without making it closed-source or otherwise heavily restricted.
For example, if party A wants party B using something S in particular, then S being being made "open source". And/or the accepted meanings&cultures of "open source" (or whatever the actual terminology is) changing, as A and S do their things.
I don't know about open source, but I'd be happy to see more Android phones that don't have Google Play services and suite of surveillance apps. Not going to get that on Huawei phones, but if Huawei starts to de-emphasize the Play Store in the future, devs might start looking to move away from Google Play distribution and towards APK downloads on their own sites.
Let's face it, the "app economy" doesn't exist unless you're on iOS and can count on a paying audience. On Android, your only hope for monetization is a free to play Clash of Clans/Candy Crush clone that's jam-packed with ads, tracking and microtransactions.
Quick question - if someone buys a Huawei phone without Play Store and Gmail, could they just download those things later? E.g. could it be done aftermarket?
Unless this google certification is stored in hardware, that's not the case. You can flash Android phones with a custom bootloader, use that to flash AOSP (open source core android)/LineageOS, and for most people doing that the next step is to flash gapps on top of that.
locked bootloader in huawei I think, even if they open it it's not really a normal sideload and will be hard enough to not be a generally applicable solution.
I've got root on my Huawei P10 lite since day one (would have returned the phone if it were closed), not sure where you got the idea that unlocking the bootloader is not possible.
they have their own AppGallery store and email app, after all gmail it's crap compared to Nine, Aqua mail or Maildroid, honestly don't understand people using it
so in the end bakery competition could benefit from this Google push, dev can choose another store not stealing 30% of their money
This doesn't affect much of Huawei's Chinese market as Google is banned in China anyway. However, this will have a huge impact on Huawei's overseas market, and it is hard for Huawei to come up with a backup plan. At the end of the day, Baidu (and other Google equivalent Chinese counterparts) has a negligible presence outside China.
I don't know anything about the supply chain for data center hardware, but it seems more likely that China would intercept shipments of say Cisco and Juniper gear and modify them (something the NSA has done) instead of building hardware with a backdoor in it?
When you buy a Cisco router do they provide a "chain of custody" proving it didn't come from or go through hostile countries? I understand these routers have a Secure Boot feature, but I can't imagine that'd defend against physical modifications.
If security was actually the goal, shouldn't we have a process to verify any piece of hardware; instead of just completely trusting some companies and not others?
This just feels like security theater, but I kind of get it. If the US is fighting China economically, this move makes a lot of sense.
This article is about Android software shipped from Google to Huawei. It does not mention data center hardware. (And in fact, I'm pretty sure Huawei are not even in the data center market. They supply telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics.
> but it seems more likely that China would intercept shipments of say Cisco
Not sure if you have been paying attention to the stock market. Many of the companies which are up are ones who have eliminated their ties with China [0]. Cisco is one such company whose stock rose recently [1] as a result of moving from China [2].
This is likely going to hurt Huawei a lot more than Google. Losing access to latest Android versions or Google apps will make it more difficult for their phones to gain adoption globally.
This move will permanently destroy trust between Chinese OEM manufacturers with Google the same way revocation of private property reduces trust in the value of property. Long term wise, this could permanently splinter Android market share especially in overseas regions like India or Africa where Chinese phones command a large portion of the marketshare.
The US is keen to fall for the Thucydides trap. For now the US is the dominant economy; by 2050, most GDP output will be in Asia. The US may win the short term skirmish, but they will lose this war. China is making inroads in the other economies that will matter in the future. This move is terribly myopic and will end with the US having given up an opportunity to work with the emerging power. Huawei powers and will continue to power the rest of the world. This isn’t changing anytime soon. India, Africa etc
I guess this is a thinly veiled attack on China, but I'm a bit confused why there's a feud between the US and China in the first place. Perhaps my ignorance is down to being British and a bit out of the loop, but could someone give a rough outline on what the underlying motives for this are?
There are many reasons, but there are two fundamental ones: Projections that the Chinese economy will overtake the US and Made in China 2025.
The first is easy to explain. The US likes being number 1, and if anyone else, whether the Chinese or the Japanese or the Indians looks like they're going to be number 1, the US doesn't like it.
The second is this: for the last 40-50 years, the US and China have been in a hugely mutually beneficial relationship, at least on the corporate level. American companies outsourced many of its lower wage lower skilled manufacturing to China and China has saved those companies a ton of money and made their owners a lot more profit. In order for China's economy to keep growing though, the Chinese believed, correctly, that they needed to move up the food chain since their labor is not as cheap as it once was. So they identified 10 "industries of the future" where they want their companies to dominate. American companies are, once again correctly, worried that since these are the industries that we would also like to dominate, that the Chinese, if they are successful, will literally eat our lunch.
There's a bunch of other stuff relating to the South China Sea, Taiwan, forced IP transfer, hacking, trade subsidies, etc. that are also causing tensions, but those two are probably the biggest ones.
thats a good summation, it's important to note that the "Made in China 2025" is the explicit
Official policy issued by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. So this is not interpretation or exaggeration.
The official policy of The Peoples Republic of China is to raise the domestic sourcing of essentially all high-tech high-value goods to 75% domestic production. And also export these goods into other markets.
They may not state it publicly but I think all the industrialied producer economies Fron the US to Europe and Asia are scared to death of the implications China 2025 has for there own high-tech high-value industries.
Huawei stole secrets from Nortel that eventually caused it to collapse, it only got worse from there. They've stolen IP from many other countries, and at this point the US is accusing them of not just stealing IP actual actually working with Chinese intelligence to make sure all Huawei devices can be hacked by China.
Your being British and out of the loop is pretty bad because your government is just as much of a target.
China is the only country that can threaten the US' status as the number one superpower in the world. Huawei's lead in 5G technology is broadly seen in Washington as a threat to US interests even though the US government has no concrete evidence of wrong doing.
China's population will actually age too fast to continue to be #1 in the world, by the end of this century India will pass China in GDP & population size, based on projections.
* US establishment growing increasingly worried about the sophistication of Chinese tech and are viewing Huawei as a strategic threat. Especially since the latest generation of Chinese telecoms tech has arguably leapfrogged western offerings. Free trade works brilliantly until you stop being the top dog.
* NSA doesn't the idea of Chinese being able to use their tech to spy on US. They'd prefer domestic US companies build tech to spy on us for them instead.
* "National security concerns" is kind of a "get of jail free card" when it comes to escaping WTO rules on protectionism, so it fits in pretty well with the rest of the trade war.
BBC Click covered the issue https://youtu.be/yCzNHi9TBCQ?t=690 onwards. They say Huawei claim to be 18months ahead [12m35] of everyone with 5G, and their interview with UK's intelligence advisor [16m20 onwards] suggested that there's not really a security problem.
They do talk about [17m04+] the possibility of the network being shutdown and the fallout of that, and have a dramatisation.
Let me give it a shot with actual references, and years of paying attention, not whatever I heard the talking heads say last night.
The US perceives the economic relationship with China to be one way. Prior to the recent trade flair ups, China was given preferential treatment, perhaps as part of a strategy to create a geopolitical ally instead of an enemy through trade. This appeared to be working for several decades with China opening up to the world and giving the appearance of freer markets and more democratization as they became wealthier. As their economy continued to grow and modernize, the trade imbalance between the United States became huge ($539 Billion in imports in 2018, only $120 Billion in exports [0]). This means that each year hundreds of billions of dollars flows directly from the US economy into the Chinese economy. In addition, with President Xi the country appears to be sliding back towards a nationalistic totalitarianism.
While both countries can still benefit from this trade, the US government is taking the stance that China has been benefiting and the US has not. The reasons that are most often cited are that the US was open to almost all Chinese imports, while many US imports were restricted or taxed more heavily than local goods [1]. Worse than that, if a US company wanted to operate in China, they were required to do so through Chinese partners that would own half of a joint venture, and intellectual property would be shared with them. After a short term benefit, all of a sudden the Chinese partner would be running their own factories, and competing against the US company with the US companies own technology. These companies are often state owned and receive funding that is considered to be anti free trade and is generally illegal in most international agreements (see the legal squabbles between Airbus and Boeing for reference). Finally the US company would be squeezed by the Chinese government (national or local), and all sorts of issues that wouldn't impact the local company would mysteriously befall the foreign company. After local Chinese companies were created, funded and protected in China by the Chinese government, they could compete with their former US partners around the world.
Therefore while the US market was open to
China, the Chinese market is not really open to the US. Finally, it has been widely known for a long time that China hosts state sponsored industrial espionage units that hack companies around the world and steal intellectual property to provide to Chinese companies[2]. US companies will spend billions of dollars researching how to do something, and then a Chinese company can just start producing it, sometimes even before the US company does. Finally, it seems like laws are not enforced in favor of US victims. If a US company steals and sells Chinese IP, they can be successfully sued in US courts. If a Chinese company steals and sells US IP, no enforcement is taken. This is a huge problem especially for small inventors, the moment they create something they lose the market to cheap Chinese knockoffs, and have no power to protect their brand or invention.
For these reasons and others, China is viewed as having a predatory trade relationship with the United States. I've heard that Huawei in particular is known to have gotten a big jump by outright stealing Cisco's router and selling it[3], and has continued with similar tactics, alongside the accusations that it is essentially an arm of Chinese intelligence services and provides backdoors in their products. I've actually heard from Chinese friends that Huawei was very proud of their ability to steal Cisco's router and it is used as a case study.
And while all this is happening, the US had a special trade relationship with China such that it was cheaper to ship goods to individuals in the US from China, instead of from inside the US itself[4].
So basically a viewpoint that I tend to agree with is that this is all about resetting the trade relationship to a normal one between peers. T...
That would be reasonable, but China has had such an advantage for so long that just getting them to a level playing field will appear to be a devastating loss. This has been furthered by how the situation has been portrayed in the media in both China and the US and around the world, with the US as the aggressor. I believe this has caused the Chinese government to miscalculate, thinking the US will lose support and back down. Instead they have been backed into a corner. Saving face is life or death for the Chinese government, so the US getting an advantageous deal would require literally world war III and I don't think anyone involved is stupid enough to actually try to make that happen.
I expect that the tariffs will stay in place permanently because any acceptable deal would require the Chinese publicly harassing their own people on behalf of the US government, and there is no way the US could enforce that. So the easiest solution are tariffs that will rebalance trade naturally, and probably the world polarizing into two main economic zones, US-centric and China-centric. And then we all just try not to kill each other for the forseeable future.
The thing that really annoys me about this is that if China would just be patient and play by the rules, be genuinely friendly to its neighbors, it would take them like 20 or 30 years longer but then the whole world would just place the crown on their head and they would peacefully become the world's only superpower. Naturally, maybe even justly. Now we all get misery because of impatience.
> The thing that really annoys me about this is that if China would just be patient and play by the rules, be genuinely friendly to its neighbors, it would take them like 20 or 30 years longer but then the whole world would just place the crown on their head and they would peacefully become the world's only superpower. Naturally, maybe even justly. Now we all get misery because of impatience.
just playing the devils advocate but, couldn’t the same have be said about the us (e.g imf, world bank, regime change wars etc)?
Old US money has considered China a threat for over 2 centuries, they are very aware of the threat China poses because their wealth was accumulated during China's destruction.
China is an economic threat because it will inevitably be superior to the US economy. India is an economic threat for the same reason.
Actually China has longstanding demographic, environmental and political problems that make its eventual dominance far from certain. They're moving away from the one-child policy too late, they're deep into the modern low-fertility-preference zone now (but more so than other modern countries because of environmental constraints), and there is no prospect of significant immigration to pick up the slack.
In regards to your last point about being patient, both the US and China know that waiting an additional 20-30 years will be at the detriment of China as they cannot compete with US population replacement levels. Compare the following graphs: US projected population: https://i.imgur.com/0UN8eNy.jpg, China projected population: https://i.imgur.com/yDsLnnb.jpg.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadOn the other hand, I wonder how Huawei / China will retaliate. Wouldn't be surprised if this kills all Google manufacturing prospects in China which pretty much kills Google hardware.
It's a bit of a reminder that Google is under US jurisdiction and there's a point to be made that, no matter what they promise you, if the US wants their data, they get their data.
More competition can only be good, if this leads to the Chinese creating a third major platform, I welcome it. If they open source it, they may even have success outside of China.
This is a lark?
The only thing the CPC is interested in is total and absolute control of the citizenry.
They'd love to have a platform for which they didn't have to monitor with gazillions of staff, and have police on corners to ensure 'government monitoring' is properly installed.
Imagine if the CPC could ensure total thought control without all the overhead?
That is exactly the objective.
There's nothing stopping 1 billion people from developing a mobile platform - or any kind of platform for that matter in 2019.
They can do it now. Or yesterday.
And the 'whole world' could be using it.
Consider for a moment why it's not happening?
Why isn't the entire world using software or hosted solutions for all of our SaaS needs in India and China?
Given that the existential nature of the Chinese economy is intertwined with the CPC, I don't think any good will come of this.
A lot of the comments and thinking abound 'trade with China' are centered around a view that it's a normal economy, but it isn't, so the regular rules don't quite apply.
In the grand grand scheme of things, Huawei is a small thing, we're seeing a realignment of forces given the new reality of China's competitive powers, irrespective of anything else.
It's hard to say where the new equilibrium will land.
Because the tech has been developed in the US, and the US has lead in it ever since.
> Given that the existential nature of the Chinese economy is intertwined with the CPC, I don't think any good will come of this.
I mean, the article being discussed here shows that US corporations are tools of US foreign policy. Yes, it's a different style of control, but it's control nonetheless.
And before the notorious flaggers run wild: I don't like the Chinese model. I don't particularly like the US model either though. I'm not judging those that profit from it for also liking it. I'm sure I would, too.
I do believe that competition limits the exploits. If there's an alternative, you have to fear losing your customers (and their money), so you limit what you do to them. If there isn't any, why would you? Right now, the competition is basically only Apple vs Google. Both USA, both from California. A bit more diversity would be nice.
I'd love some real competition. Chinese, Russian, European alternatives. I would have a hard time trusting Chinese or Russian systems, maybe rightfully, maybe because decades of Propaganda have taken their toll. I'd still like to see them.
As non-American (and non-Chinese I assume), the Chinese do not care about you, but the Americans very much do.
Neither can be trusted to retain a glass of water, let alone personally identifying information that can spur advertising campaigns and sway elections in countries around the world.
Is this a "force people to buy USA manufactured goods; but blame it on the Chinese" attempt?
Likewise, Google has almost zero consumer exposure in China, so all they can do is interrupt their ability to give Chinese companies money for goods and services, which seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The Chinese government doesn't want the west to grow new supply chains and find new manufacturing centers just because of one trade war, it wouldn't be according to their goals.
Imagine in 2021 the Chinese government mandates that every Chinese smartphone manufacturer needs to switch to ChAndroid for all of their product lines, with a single unified app store, whether they sell the phones inside or outside of China. Well, fully half of the top smartphone companies in the world are Chinese. So all of a sudden Google would lose the ability to monetize on almost half of the ecosystem.
And if it were open and successful, other Android manufacturers could move over. Samsung would LOVE the ability to get a piece of the search and app revenue on every one of their phones. Right now they're locked out because of Google's licensing agreement for Android, but they must look at how much money Google pays Apple every year to be the default search provider very longingly.
An OS mandated by the Chinese government. That’s pretty much the opposite open in multiple ways.
Android is open source, these vendors are free to fork and do whatever.
The lion's haul for Google is not 'app store sales' in China , it's search.
Android is not about App Store, that's just a marginal thing - it's about owning and controlling search everywhere. It's a means to extend their primary product.
Samsung can make it's own app store tomorrow, but they're not going to get 'Google Search' - which is what people want - so they'll have to do for now.
As far as Huawei ... well, open trade can only be had by like economies. If one economy can externalize pollution, labour costs, healthcare, and the other can't - then there cannot be open trade. Same thing for more contentious issues such as IP theft, foreign ownership rules, capital controls, state control of enterprises.
Huawei is the example, the tip of the spear. It hardly even matters what the degree of materiality is, that said, there should be not question that there's existential risk with Huawei. The CCP can require Huawei to do whatever, at any time, and Huawei will happily comply.
China can't enjoy the advantages of a 'developing economy' while trying to put 1st tier industries form advanced economies out of business, it's not going to sit well.
So we saw the big rise of China, now they're slowing down to 'nice growth' instead of crazy growth, they're grabbing land and industry so the West is wary. Meaning the trade rules will change.
This is the new normal.
What do you mean, tomorrow? Go to http://samsungapps.com/ and start to sell all your apps on Samsung Galaxy Store!
It sure seems like the future is more and more walls, more and more reactionary defensive measures. Nobody seems to have any inclination to resist this trend.
For instance gdpr, copyright directive, tax laws (was a story the other day about you having to comply with a lot of local tax laws - consider what happens if you are unable or unwilling to comply with 1000s of special snowflake tax rules, presumably the authority rests on blocking).
These examples are not quite freedom of speech, but will lead to a breaking apart of the internet all the same.
Are any of these stores near the quality levels that Western audiences expect? My experience with software from China was consistently bad. Even the AliExpress web site looks like a cobbled together, barely working mess that people only put up with because of the low prices of the goods you can buy there, which won't work for app stores.
This sounds like it all revolves around Android / Huawei getting booted from the Open Handset Alliance maybe?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-huaweitech/chin... >>The U.S. Commerce Department said on Wednesday it is adding Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and 70 affiliates to its so-called “Entity List” - a move that bans the telecom giant from buying parts and components from U.S. companies without U.S. government approval.
One might be able to stretch this to 'US aids potential cyber attacks in China' since phones in China might no longer receive security updates in Android.
But Huawei has a large marketshare outside China. E.g. in Europe they are currently neck-to-neck with Apple in smartphone sales.
you can get updates through their own app store AppGallery, but your paid apps are paid through Google, so don't expect them in order store, tying your money to Google ecosystem was bad idea in first place
Probably not after Android 8.
Probably not after Android 8.
>"There should be a wide list of companies to whom this applies now." //
I assumed the "this" was "the USA's trade blacklist". The blacklist applies to all companies AFAICT, though you are right it will probably only affect a small proportion.
Though any USA based company may have bought a Huawei phone, router, or similar, and presumably will not be allowed by law to do so henceforth?
Not sure how things like peering with a company that uses Huawei kit, or something, would work. How deep does it go? Can you buy phone service in countries where the phone supplier has Huawei base stations?
Google is fighting hard to keep their app store on Huawei devices, because they don't want 10Ms of users to force-adopt alternative app stores.
Huawei's products are vulnerable by default, anyone can look up the applicable CVEs and run the proof of concept code for said CVE to pop a shell. China doesn't have exclusive access :)
Remember that Huawei settled out of court to the 'allegation' that they copied Cisco's source code.
So, are Facebook a front for the CIA?
Heck, if you look at where Chinese officials try to stash their money and their families, it's clear they trust Western countries a lot more too.
As an EU citizen, idk, China seems more locally focused, the U.S reaches everywhere. Speaking of NZ, the whole Kim Dotcom situation makes it look like a U.S.vassal state, honestly.
Not only that, the ban encourages a long term move away from US-based tech as alternatives are needed within China. This new tech will ultimately be available worldwide, but no longer owned or controlled by US companies.
As someone from neither China or US, it seems crazy. It’s one thing to ban Huawei from your own markets for security concerns, but by making such a heavy handed ban on working with them, the US government seem to be making the US less secure short term, but also US companies will be less competitive and less influential in the world long term.
China blocked Google play years ago and repeatedly blocks every attempt Google tries to make to relaunch back into china [0] so they did that a long time ago.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/google-misses-out-on-billion...
Like they have no choice with tax laws. Or no choice with cartel laws. Or no choice with data protection laws.
They are agressively trying to circumvent many laws all the times to extend their monopoly and grow their profits. They have multi-billion fines from the EU and several member states pending and no somewhat critical thinking citizen would claim that EU has been particularly tough on their monopoly and tax evasions.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18531350/google-android-q-...
Huawei, ZTE and consorts are literally owned by PRC cadre and are actively involved in infrastructure to spy on and terrorize minority groups in China, as well as getting caught spying and stealing IP abroad.
I think there is no need to answer each post with Whataboutism, especially when the comparision is to tilted against Chinese companies.
The problem is, for me, it's impossible to know if that's true or if that's the external appearance that's been designed. Nearly everyone in Apple wouldn't know either. Legally, it seems, NSA letters could force such a situation.
AIR the much publicised event of 'FBI wanted to open someone's phone and Apple wouldn't' ultimately ended in a third party enabling it. So, this could easily have gone down that Apple said "we can't do that because it will kill our privacy angle in the market" and the FBI say "well just pass on the info to this third party" [eg some key needed to sign updates; or an update that decrypts all internal memories and dumps them to a port on boot, or whatever].
That's entirely undiscoverable and serves the interest of both FBI and Apple, FBI ideally want to have "backdoors" where it's publicly known "there is no backdoor".
No, seriously, AOSP is very far from useful. That's before you consider that to run Android on any sort of recent hardware, you need manufacturer support from the chips you are using, which you can't get if you are barred from trade with them.
And it would be way worse with Huawei/Xiaomi & co. for devs, considering how those companies update the software on their phones...
Around the world?
I'm surprised that Huawei is such a threat to USA industry to be honest.
Perhaps Trump's team has shares in their opposition, or was trying to short them?
It's these liberal and western high ethics at work here...
The project is very much European: lots of countries involved.
Why can't the EU buy gas from wherever we want?
Who is the the US to tell us where to buy our gas from?
It only takes the Republican Party winning 1 election to destroy economic freedom.
My political thoughts are going to change drastically if we can resew economic conditions with China after Trump leaves office.
> SCMP is owned by Alibaba, they're far from impartial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post .
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Engadget
And given the PRC's enormous, well-documented investments into perverting the truth and framing the narrative worldwide, more developed than most; even an arm's length relationship is too close for me to put that sort of trust into a a venture like this.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/uk-says-huawei-equip...
Here is a helpful read, http://zeihan.com/my-way-or-the-huawei/
There seems value in just taking the reigns, and making whatever you create open-source, so that ZTE and all the other Chinese manufacturers can use it as well.
Its certainly a major blow to the value of Huawei phones.
Three months ago.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3001685/huawei-co...
Google Maps is a masterpiece of engineering and it's hard to imagine that Huawei will be able to compete, near term. If I'm reading the situation right, this might mean the end of Huawei in the western phone market unless something changes.
Baidu Maps is very good though, I would even say on par with Google Maps and better in some areas. It does however have more obvious ads which is annoying.
Which is a huge deal for Huawei, imo.
It's good for me¹. I want a device that does no phone home to its mothership outside my control. This requires Googles Services not to be installed.
I don't doubt that many nevertheless still use Googles Services.
¹ compared to Googles Android. I'm still desperately waiting for a device with mainline Linux support without blobs.
Will never happen.
Apart from that the other options you have, are (in random order): /e/, PureOS, KaiOS, SailfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, postmarketOS, among others.
That's not going to be good enough for Huawei.
Similarly, all of those alternative OSes aren't going to work if they're not binary, and more importantly API compatible with Android + GMS.
The question is rather: given that it is FOSS is it good enough for them to extend the functionality on the short-term?
> Similarly, all of those alternative OSes aren't going to work if they're not binary, and more importantly API compatible with Android + GMS.
KaiOS has some compatibility (by design not fully compatible).
SailfishOS has an Android emulator. Other OSes could also use one such as Anbox.
/e/ and LineageOS are binary and API compatible with Android.
GMS is an issue, but given that Google is under a magnifying glass concerning monopoly position related to Android in EU I have some hope that alternatives for GMS (or FOSS implementations) could happen.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/huawei-stop-providing-bootloa...
If you do unlock the device and install Lineage OS (which doesn't support more than a few devices), you now basically have a crappy camera app, probably your FreeBuds won't work properly anymore and you really should have bought a different phone.
I love Lineage OS and used it for years (OPO and other phones). It would ruin my P30P though.
This news, if true, will affect the devices made by Huawei and sold worldwide though.
Android security updates are part of AOSP [0]. The article explicitly mentions that Huawei still has access to Google’s OSS stuff. And besides, they couldn’t really block Huawei from accessing open-source stuff without making it closed-source or otherwise heavily restricted.
[0]: https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2019-05-01
Could this nudge an interesting (good/bad) development in open source?
Let's face it, the "app economy" doesn't exist unless you're on iOS and can count on a paying audience. On Android, your only hope for monetization is a free to play Clash of Clans/Candy Crush clone that's jam-packed with ads, tracking and microtransactions.
Here's a popular gapps distribution: https://opengapps.org/#aboutsection
Google's requirements mainly apply to OEMs bundling gapps into their stock images.
so in the end bakery competition could benefit from this Google push, dev can choose another store not stealing 30% of their money
When you buy a Cisco router do they provide a "chain of custody" proving it didn't come from or go through hostile countries? I understand these routers have a Secure Boot feature, but I can't imagine that'd defend against physical modifications.
If security was actually the goal, shouldn't we have a process to verify any piece of hardware; instead of just completely trusting some companies and not others?
This just feels like security theater, but I kind of get it. If the US is fighting China economically, this move makes a lot of sense.
Not sure if you have been paying attention to the stock market. Many of the companies which are up are ones who have eliminated their ties with China [0]. Cisco is one such company whose stock rose recently [1] as a result of moving from China [2].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-vck6ebnE
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_uohGLOiK0
[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/312f7b52-7765-11e9-be7d-6d846537a...
The first is easy to explain. The US likes being number 1, and if anyone else, whether the Chinese or the Japanese or the Indians looks like they're going to be number 1, the US doesn't like it.
The second is this: for the last 40-50 years, the US and China have been in a hugely mutually beneficial relationship, at least on the corporate level. American companies outsourced many of its lower wage lower skilled manufacturing to China and China has saved those companies a ton of money and made their owners a lot more profit. In order for China's economy to keep growing though, the Chinese believed, correctly, that they needed to move up the food chain since their labor is not as cheap as it once was. So they identified 10 "industries of the future" where they want their companies to dominate. American companies are, once again correctly, worried that since these are the industries that we would also like to dominate, that the Chinese, if they are successful, will literally eat our lunch.
There's a bunch of other stuff relating to the South China Sea, Taiwan, forced IP transfer, hacking, trade subsidies, etc. that are also causing tensions, but those two are probably the biggest ones.
They may not state it publicly but I think all the industrialied producer economies Fron the US to Europe and Asia are scared to death of the implications China 2025 has for there own high-tech high-value industries.
Huawei stole secrets from Nortel that eventually caused it to collapse, it only got worse from there. They've stolen IP from many other countries, and at this point the US is accusing them of not just stealing IP actual actually working with Chinese intelligence to make sure all Huawei devices can be hacked by China.
Your being British and out of the loop is pretty bad because your government is just as much of a target.
These immigrants then steal our technology to send back to china
they also steal technology by sending students to our schools
the Chinese cannot and will not innovate.
To stop China we need to ban all Chinese immigration and start educating real americans in our schools and not Chinese spies
* Trump has been on at China for a long time.
* US establishment growing increasingly worried about the sophistication of Chinese tech and are viewing Huawei as a strategic threat. Especially since the latest generation of Chinese telecoms tech has arguably leapfrogged western offerings. Free trade works brilliantly until you stop being the top dog.
* NSA doesn't the idea of Chinese being able to use their tech to spy on US. They'd prefer domestic US companies build tech to spy on us for them instead.
* "National security concerns" is kind of a "get of jail free card" when it comes to escaping WTO rules on protectionism, so it fits in pretty well with the rest of the trade war.
They do talk about [17m04+] the possibility of the network being shutdown and the fallout of that, and have a dramatisation.
Nonetheless the NSA is trying to pretend that Huawei is currently installing backdoors.
The US perceives the economic relationship with China to be one way. Prior to the recent trade flair ups, China was given preferential treatment, perhaps as part of a strategy to create a geopolitical ally instead of an enemy through trade. This appeared to be working for several decades with China opening up to the world and giving the appearance of freer markets and more democratization as they became wealthier. As their economy continued to grow and modernize, the trade imbalance between the United States became huge ($539 Billion in imports in 2018, only $120 Billion in exports [0]). This means that each year hundreds of billions of dollars flows directly from the US economy into the Chinese economy. In addition, with President Xi the country appears to be sliding back towards a nationalistic totalitarianism.
While both countries can still benefit from this trade, the US government is taking the stance that China has been benefiting and the US has not. The reasons that are most often cited are that the US was open to almost all Chinese imports, while many US imports were restricted or taxed more heavily than local goods [1]. Worse than that, if a US company wanted to operate in China, they were required to do so through Chinese partners that would own half of a joint venture, and intellectual property would be shared with them. After a short term benefit, all of a sudden the Chinese partner would be running their own factories, and competing against the US company with the US companies own technology. These companies are often state owned and receive funding that is considered to be anti free trade and is generally illegal in most international agreements (see the legal squabbles between Airbus and Boeing for reference). Finally the US company would be squeezed by the Chinese government (national or local), and all sorts of issues that wouldn't impact the local company would mysteriously befall the foreign company. After local Chinese companies were created, funded and protected in China by the Chinese government, they could compete with their former US partners around the world.
Therefore while the US market was open to China, the Chinese market is not really open to the US. Finally, it has been widely known for a long time that China hosts state sponsored industrial espionage units that hack companies around the world and steal intellectual property to provide to Chinese companies[2]. US companies will spend billions of dollars researching how to do something, and then a Chinese company can just start producing it, sometimes even before the US company does. Finally, it seems like laws are not enforced in favor of US victims. If a US company steals and sells Chinese IP, they can be successfully sued in US courts. If a Chinese company steals and sells US IP, no enforcement is taken. This is a huge problem especially for small inventors, the moment they create something they lose the market to cheap Chinese knockoffs, and have no power to protect their brand or invention.
For these reasons and others, China is viewed as having a predatory trade relationship with the United States. I've heard that Huawei in particular is known to have gotten a big jump by outright stealing Cisco's router and selling it[3], and has continued with similar tactics, alongside the accusations that it is essentially an arm of Chinese intelligence services and provides backdoors in their products. I've actually heard from Chinese friends that Huawei was very proud of their ability to steal Cisco's router and it is used as a case study.
And while all this is happening, the US had a special trade relationship with China such that it was cheaper to ship goods to individuals in the US from China, instead of from inside the US itself[4].
So basically a viewpoint that I tend to agree with is that this is all about resetting the trade relationship to a normal one between peers. T...
Fairly sure you're wrong on this, the US now wants an advantageous relationship. Not an even score.
Just returning to even ground would let China keep the advantages it has reaped.
I expect that the tariffs will stay in place permanently because any acceptable deal would require the Chinese publicly harassing their own people on behalf of the US government, and there is no way the US could enforce that. So the easiest solution are tariffs that will rebalance trade naturally, and probably the world polarizing into two main economic zones, US-centric and China-centric. And then we all just try not to kill each other for the forseeable future.
The thing that really annoys me about this is that if China would just be patient and play by the rules, be genuinely friendly to its neighbors, it would take them like 20 or 30 years longer but then the whole world would just place the crown on their head and they would peacefully become the world's only superpower. Naturally, maybe even justly. Now we all get misery because of impatience.
just playing the devils advocate but, couldn’t the same have be said about the us (e.g imf, world bank, regime change wars etc)?
China is an economic threat because it will inevitably be superior to the US economy. India is an economic threat for the same reason.
This is ridiculous. No one thinks it is one way. The spanish sending south american gold back to spain was one way.
What is actually happening, is some people think it is unfairly biased towards China.