Intense anxiety of US leads to witch hunt of Huawei: China Daily editorial

It may be because of what it has achieved as one of the world’s telecommunications technology giants, of which Chinese people are proud, but Huawei Technologies Co Ltd has become a thorn in the flesh of the United States.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers introduced bills on Wednesday that would ban the sale of US chips or other components to Huawei, ZTE Corp or any other Chinese telecommunications company that they believe has violated US sanctions or export control laws.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources, that the Justice Department is looking into allegations of theft of trade secrets from Huawei’s US business partners, including a T-Mobile robotic device used to test smartphones.

However, the US has done a lot of looking, and from the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, in Canada at the instigation of the United States, to the repeated warnings by the US to its allies not to use Huawei products and not to cooperate with Huawei, it has not provided a shred of evidence to support its allegations.

The US politicians may believe that a lie repeated a thousand times will be accepted as truth. But they should know that they will only shame themselves when Huawei proves innocent of all their allegations.

As far as the US interests are concerned, they seem to be so paranoid about Huawei and the rise of China that they have forgotten that technology companies all over the world now rely on each other for innovation and development because of the globalized supply chain. No technology company can survive without the procurement of components from others.

What the US government and its politicians are doing with Huawei will certainly make things difficult for the Chinese telecommunications giant. But they are also doing a disservice to the development of the telecommunications technology across the world.

It may be because its success portends the rise of China as the major rival of the US that some US politicians spare no efforts in demonizing Huawei with a view to strangling its development. But by talking ill of Huawei as a technology thief and a company engaged in espionage on behalf of the Chinese government, those US politicians are politicizing business matters. That will not only sabotage the normal development of China-US relations but also inevitably the progress of the global telecommunications industry.

Huawei has 180,000 employees all over the world, participating in global telecommunications construction under different conditions. And according to rotating-Chairman Hu Houkun at a round-table with international media organizations on Dec 18, it plans to launch more chipsets, hardware and software solutions for artificial intelligence to help customers maximize the benefits of 5G technology.

And there’s the rub — the US crackdown on Huawei is a politicized attack provoked by the Washington’s paranoia that the US will lose its pole position in the latest technology race.