10 ms·

America's assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring

49 points by neofrommatrix 2y ago

talldayo 2y ago
To say nothing of sanctions, they're certainly swimming in beef: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40685175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40685175
throwaway4good 2y ago
https://archive.md/jts4M https://archive.md/jts4M
drunkenmagician 2y ago
But from who and where will Huawei future growth come from? Domestic Chiba sales alone. Their market presence is very strong there, but in the EU and US definitely not the case. It will be interesting to see if their tech can overcome the politics.
- throwaway4good 2y ago
  It will come from the rest of the world. A 10 mio people city in Africa needs just as many 5G base stations as a 10 mio people city in the US.
  - jsiepkes 2y ago
    I highly doubt Africa cares about 5G as much as the west does. Someone will need to pay for that stuff and 5G also needs to be hooked up to a backhaul which supports 5G speeds.
    - nothercastle 2y ago
      Their 5g is their primary internet. Land lines are mostly a western luxury. High end phones are probably not in play but lower end ones are
    - cvladan 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - vikramkr 2y ago
      It's way more efficient and logical to skip right to high speed mobile data than build out cable/optical/landline infrastructure
    - theturtletalks 2y ago
      China tends to offer these countries loans and even subsidies so they can build that infrastructure. Trade off is that China will control that part of that country’s operations for the foreseeable future. It’s how they came to control many ports in developing countries.
usernamed7 2y ago
[flagged]
- mistermann 2y ago
  Your comment could also be considered a form of propaganda. Another layer of the onion is the truth values (perceived/cultural truth, "actual" truth, etc) of the respective claims, though that often gets overlooked when it comes to propaganda, or geopolitics in general.
  - tucnak 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - cyanydeez 2y ago
      "This originates from China "
  - fnordpiglet 2y ago
    If the article was written in China and allowed to be published it was reviewed and aligned to the ideological language and goals of the CCP by government propaganda officials. That’s the way the laws work. It’s not a form of propaganda to recognize the structural fact that any material originating from China is, by intentional construction, propaganda. Whatsboutism doesn’t change that.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >If the article was written in China and allowed to be published it was reviewed and aligned to the ideological language and goals of the CCP by government propaganda officials. That’s the way the laws work. If you're trying to imply the fact the article is published implies there's some sort of CCP interference, that makes no sense considering that The Economist is blocked in china. Moreover there's a decidedly anti-CCP article published in the same issue as this article[2], which further strains the claim that The Economist is some sort of pro-CCP publication. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... [2] https://www.economist.com/china/2024/06/13/why-china-takes-young-tibetans-from-their-families https://www.economist.com/china/2024/06/13/why-china-takes-y...
skybrian 2y ago
It's a good update, but the framing is that primary goal of the US was to ruin Huawei rather than to stop depending on their products. I'm not sure how true that is.
- gruez 2y ago
  If all the US wanted to do was to "stop depending on their products", why would they seek to prevent US and foreign companies (if they're using US technology) from selling to huawei? That seems to go far beyond "stop depending on their products".
  - skybrian 2y ago
    I think that’s sometimes framed as not wanting to help China improve in technologically advanced industries? But of course it will improve anyway. Maybe the article could have been framed in a less binary way: it didn’t slow them down as much as they hoped.
    - al_borland 2y ago
      >I think that’s sometimes framed as not wanting to help China improve in technologically advanced industries? If this was the case we'd pull all manufacturing out of China completely. The knowledge transfer from the US to China when it comes to manufacturing, from basic goods up to modern tech, has been wild. With that comes a lot of information on how to advance technology.
  - quickthrowman 2y ago
    There are geopolitical and economic advantages gained by the west through denying China access to ASML’s semiconductor tooling. Western aligned semiconductor companies have the leading edge semiconductor market locked down, and forces China to use semiconductors that aren’t bleeding edge for their own internal use, militarily or otherwise. I’m speculating that the vast manufacturing knowledge transfer to China through offshoring is seen as a “bad thing” by western politicians, who then sought to limit China’s ability to do the same with semiconductors. China will likely figure out EUV eventually, by hook or by crook. There’s only so much you can do to keep that knowledge contained, considering the amount of people who have the knowledge.
gnfargbl 2y ago
> An executive from Clarin, an Argentine media group, told a Huawei event in May that his firm was replacing expensive Oracle database software with Gauss, Huawei’s offering. This seems like an odd development. I can well understand why an organisation would want to drop Oracle RDBMS, but why move to another proprietary solution? The obvious replacement for Oracle's database is Postgres, no? Is Huawei getting into the business of customizing their software to fit organisational processes then charging through the nose for that work?
- jowdones 2y ago
  >> Why an organisation would want to drop Oracle RDBMS, but why move to another proprietary solution? Bribes.
- throwaway4good 2y ago
  Oracle is prohibited from selling to Huawei - that is why they have built an alternative. And OpenGauss is based on Postgres: https://gitee.com/opengauss/openGauss-server https://gitee.com/opengauss/openGauss-server
  - hedora 2y ago
    I looked into OpenGauss a while back. It seems really solid. Among other things, they added various compatibility modes for stuff like software that targets Oracle. They have a ton of customers, and a ton of revenue. The US-imposed export ban has completely backfired in this case. It's equivalent to China forcing everyone in their own market to subsidize direct competitors to US firms. The electric car subsidies DC is complaining about are nothing compared to this. I remember when the export ban took effect. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that the outcome would be a much stronger Chinese technology sector. I can't decide if US leadership is really that dumb, or if there's some sort of conflict-of-interest / corruption / coercion at play.
    - LadyCailin 2y ago
      I don’t think the goal was ever to bankrupt Huawei so some US form could swoop in. It was and is about national security. Do you think China wouldn’t bug equipment sent to the US? That seems like a bad bet.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
khaki54 2y ago
Link around the paywall. https://archive.ph/5toJo https://archive.ph/5toJo The article is just a huge gaslighting piece. The U.S. was trying to reduce exposure to Huawei equipment in U.S. and allied Critical Infrastructure. The Chinese government and intelligence services were using the equipment for espionage. Huawei was dumping (economic term for selling below market home price or sometimes manufacturing cost) 5G equipment on U.S. telecoms. China already had good success with a similar model dumping large power equipment on regional utilities in the U.S. to the point where it's no longer economically feasible for it to be removed, and the U.S. was forced to pivot to attempting to mitigate (vs. eliminate) the risk.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
It was never an assassination attempt, but an attempt to increase the cost of doing business and further incentivize the CCP to waste money and run their economy less effectively.
alephnerd 2y ago
Everyone seems to be ignoring the core thesis of this article and seems to only be discussing the title > America’s policymakers are also learning from their mistakes. The gradual ratcheting-up of sanctions on Huawei, and especially the 28-month gap between the announcement of the most severe measures in 2018 and their implementation in 2020, gave the firm lots of time to prepare, China hawks lament. But the bigger lesson from Huawei’s torment has not yet sunk in: that cutting the firm off from Western technology did not stifle it, but instead increased its incentives to innovate. China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of ai for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now. Basically, the ad hoc and imprecise sanctions regime used by the Trump admin gave too much lead time for Huawei to begin indigenizing its capabilities. This is a mistake the US learned from and can be seen with SMIC, YMTC, and other state run champions (BYD is a domestic champion but NOT state run). I'd highly recommend listening to Rush Doshi if you want to understand the US's China policy - he's the NSC Advisor who was in charge of China policy in the Biden admin until a couple weeks ago.
- tw04 2y ago
  I don’t know if people are ignorant or just misinformed. Do you really think China wasn’t already actively building and/or stealing this tech while still doing business with American companies? This has been their MO for a decade now and people are still trying to claim America fighting back is somehow helping China. Such a ridiculous take. I’m not in a spot to dig it up, but processor tech was something the party decided was a national security issue long, long before any sanction was even whispered about.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Do you really think China wasn’t already actively building and/or stealing this tech while still doing business with American companies No. I and policymakers I used to work with have been cognizant about this for around a decade now. Check out the Sullivan Principle - technology will diffuse, but putting roadblocks to maintain the existing lead is critical. > but processor tech was something the party decided was a national security issue long, long before any sanction was even whispered about Absolutely, yet 10 years ago China was 2 generations behind, and with Huawei's announcement, they are still 2 generations behind. The difference is almost $100B was spent by the PRC just to keep the status quo. These are hard problems, and very targeted and swift sanctions DO make it harder
zallarak 2y ago
This outcome couldn't have been more obvious.
nico 2y ago
Could we just stop doing this petty stuff and align as a species? It seems like that is essentially humanity’s toughest challenge. Not the space race, not weapons, not global warming Our hardest challenge is effective coordination If we can solve that one, we can solve all the other ones pretty quickly
- ralusek 2y ago
  Trust me, a minimum of a bipolar world is much, much better than a monopolar one.
  - fnordpiglet 2y ago
    Until your family is killed in a proxy war I guess
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Pax Americana has been the most peaceful era in recorded human history.
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  Sure, that’s theoretically possible. You just need to eliminate resource scarcity (and/or human nature) and then your plan will work. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    > You just need to eliminate resource scarcity Well, we are very close to that. So I guess, yeah, let's move that way. (At least until fast-growing populations appear from the fringes and refuse to integrate into the main memetic pool. That one is at least centuries away, so yeah, let's move that way.)
StarterPro 2y ago
If our politicians worried more about helping out their people instead of hindering their perceived enemies, then we might actually get somewhere.
rbrtdrmpc- 2y ago
Can’t really assess the quality of a pay walled article, but HUAWEI non capability to meet security criteria is something that was proven by someone very close to me (high school buddy working as a secirity specialist for counterspionage agency in Italy) This evidence was mostly used as leverage to lower unit of piece cost by the government for low risk devices, whatever you get by my factual experience is up to you
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Works where archive.md is blocked: https://beta.economist.com/briefing/2024/06/13/americas-assassination-attempt-on-huawei-is-backfiring https://beta.economist.com/briefing/2024/06/13/americas-assa...

49 points by neofrommatrix 2y ago

To say nothing of sanctions, they're certainly swimming in beef: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40685175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40685175

throwaway4good 2y ago

https://archive.md/jts4M https://archive.md/jts4M

drunkenmagician 2y ago

But from who and where will Huawei future growth come from? Domestic Chiba sales alone. Their market presence is very strong there, but in the EU and US definitely not the case. It will be interesting to see if their tech can overcome the politics.

throwaway4good 2y ago
It will come from the rest of the world. A 10 mio people city in Africa needs just as many 5G base stations as a 10 mio people city in the US.
- jsiepkes 2y ago
  I highly doubt Africa cares about 5G as much as the west does. Someone will need to pay for that stuff and 5G also needs to be hooked up to a backhaul which supports 5G speeds.
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    Their 5g is their primary internet. Land lines are mostly a western luxury. High end phones are probably not in play but lower end ones are
  - cvladan 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - vikramkr 2y ago
    It's way more efficient and logical to skip right to high speed mobile data than build out cable/optical/landline infrastructure
  - theturtletalks 2y ago
    China tends to offer these countries loans and even subsidies so they can build that infrastructure. Trade off is that China will control that part of that country’s operations for the foreseeable future. It’s how they came to control many ports in developing countries.

usernamed7 2y ago

[flagged]

mistermann 2y ago
Your comment could also be considered a form of propaganda. Another layer of the onion is the truth values (perceived/cultural truth, "actual" truth, etc) of the respective claims, though that often gets overlooked when it comes to propaganda, or geopolitics in general.
- tucnak 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - cyanydeez 2y ago
    "This originates from China "
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  If the article was written in China and allowed to be published it was reviewed and aligned to the ideological language and goals of the CCP by government propaganda officials. That’s the way the laws work. It’s not a form of propaganda to recognize the structural fact that any material originating from China is, by intentional construction, propaganda. Whatsboutism doesn’t change that.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >If the article was written in China and allowed to be published it was reviewed and aligned to the ideological language and goals of the CCP by government propaganda officials. That’s the way the laws work. If you're trying to imply the fact the article is published implies there's some sort of CCP interference, that makes no sense considering that The Economist is blocked in china. Moreover there's a decidedly anti-CCP article published in the same issue as this article[2], which further strains the claim that The Economist is some sort of pro-CCP publication. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma... [2] https://www.economist.com/china/2024/06/13/why-china-takes-young-tibetans-from-their-families https://www.economist.com/china/2024/06/13/why-china-takes-y...

skybrian 2y ago

It's a good update, but the framing is that primary goal of the US was to ruin Huawei rather than to stop depending on their products. I'm not sure how true that is.

gruez 2y ago
If all the US wanted to do was to "stop depending on their products", why would they seek to prevent US and foreign companies (if they're using US technology) from selling to huawei? That seems to go far beyond "stop depending on their products".
- skybrian 2y ago
  I think that’s sometimes framed as not wanting to help China improve in technologically advanced industries? But of course it will improve anyway. Maybe the article could have been framed in a less binary way: it didn’t slow them down as much as they hoped.
  - al_borland 2y ago
    >I think that’s sometimes framed as not wanting to help China improve in technologically advanced industries? If this was the case we'd pull all manufacturing out of China completely. The knowledge transfer from the US to China when it comes to manufacturing, from basic goods up to modern tech, has been wild. With that comes a lot of information on how to advance technology.
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  There are geopolitical and economic advantages gained by the west through denying China access to ASML’s semiconductor tooling. Western aligned semiconductor companies have the leading edge semiconductor market locked down, and forces China to use semiconductors that aren’t bleeding edge for their own internal use, militarily or otherwise. I’m speculating that the vast manufacturing knowledge transfer to China through offshoring is seen as a “bad thing” by western politicians, who then sought to limit China’s ability to do the same with semiconductors. China will likely figure out EUV eventually, by hook or by crook. There’s only so much you can do to keep that knowledge contained, considering the amount of people who have the knowledge.

gnfargbl 2y ago

> An executive from Clarin, an Argentine media group, told a Huawei event in May that his firm was replacing expensive Oracle database software with Gauss, Huawei’s offering. This seems like an odd development. I can well understand why an organisation would want to drop Oracle RDBMS, but why move to another proprietary solution? The obvious replacement for Oracle's database is Postgres, no? Is Huawei getting into the business of customizing their software to fit organisational processes then charging through the nose for that work?

jowdones 2y ago
>> Why an organisation would want to drop Oracle RDBMS, but why move to another proprietary solution? Bribes.
throwaway4good 2y ago
Oracle is prohibited from selling to Huawei - that is why they have built an alternative. And OpenGauss is based on Postgres: https://gitee.com/opengauss/openGauss-server https://gitee.com/opengauss/openGauss-server
- hedora 2y ago
  I looked into OpenGauss a while back. It seems really solid. Among other things, they added various compatibility modes for stuff like software that targets Oracle. They have a ton of customers, and a ton of revenue. The US-imposed export ban has completely backfired in this case. It's equivalent to China forcing everyone in their own market to subsidize direct competitors to US firms. The electric car subsidies DC is complaining about are nothing compared to this. I remember when the export ban took effect. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that the outcome would be a much stronger Chinese technology sector. I can't decide if US leadership is really that dumb, or if there's some sort of conflict-of-interest / corruption / coercion at play.
  - LadyCailin 2y ago
    I don’t think the goal was ever to bankrupt Huawei so some US form could swoop in. It was and is about national security. Do you think China wouldn’t bug equipment sent to the US? That seems like a bad bet.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

khaki54 2y ago

Link around the paywall. https://archive.ph/5toJo https://archive.ph/5toJo The article is just a huge gaslighting piece. The U.S. was trying to reduce exposure to Huawei equipment in U.S. and allied Critical Infrastructure. The Chinese government and intelligence services were using the equipment for espionage. Huawei was dumping (economic term for selling below market home price or sometimes manufacturing cost) 5G equipment on U.S. telecoms. China already had good success with a similar model dumping large power equipment on regional utilities in the U.S. to the point where it's no longer economically feasible for it to be removed, and the U.S. was forced to pivot to attempting to mitigate (vs. eliminate) the risk.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

It was never an assassination attempt, but an attempt to increase the cost of doing business and further incentivize the CCP to waste money and run their economy less effectively.

alephnerd 2y ago

Everyone seems to be ignoring the core thesis of this article and seems to only be discussing the title > America’s policymakers are also learning from their mistakes. The gradual ratcheting-up of sanctions on Huawei, and especially the 28-month gap between the announcement of the most severe measures in 2018 and their implementation in 2020, gave the firm lots of time to prepare, China hawks lament. But the bigger lesson from Huawei’s torment has not yet sunk in: that cutting the firm off from Western technology did not stifle it, but instead increased its incentives to innovate. China is still years behind the West in chipmaking. Sanctions on high-powered semiconductors have raised costs and slowed the uptake of ai for thousands of firms, as intended. Hubble’s investments are still far from replacing Western lithography machines and other components. But if Huawei was a worry when America first declared war, it is a bigger one now. Basically, the ad hoc and imprecise sanctions regime used by the Trump admin gave too much lead time for Huawei to begin indigenizing its capabilities. This is a mistake the US learned from and can be seen with SMIC, YMTC, and other state run champions (BYD is a domestic champion but NOT state run). I'd highly recommend listening to Rush Doshi if you want to understand the US's China policy - he's the NSC Advisor who was in charge of China policy in the Biden admin until a couple weeks ago.

tw04 2y ago
I don’t know if people are ignorant or just misinformed. Do you really think China wasn’t already actively building and/or stealing this tech while still doing business with American companies? This has been their MO for a decade now and people are still trying to claim America fighting back is somehow helping China. Such a ridiculous take. I’m not in a spot to dig it up, but processor tech was something the party decided was a national security issue long, long before any sanction was even whispered about.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > Do you really think China wasn’t already actively building and/or stealing this tech while still doing business with American companies No. I and policymakers I used to work with have been cognizant about this for around a decade now. Check out the Sullivan Principle - technology will diffuse, but putting roadblocks to maintain the existing lead is critical. > but processor tech was something the party decided was a national security issue long, long before any sanction was even whispered about Absolutely, yet 10 years ago China was 2 generations behind, and with Huawei's announcement, they are still 2 generations behind. The difference is almost $100B was spent by the PRC just to keep the status quo. These are hard problems, and very targeted and swift sanctions DO make it harder

zallarak 2y ago

This outcome couldn't have been more obvious.

nico 2y ago

Could we just stop doing this petty stuff and align as a species? It seems like that is essentially humanity’s toughest challenge. Not the space race, not weapons, not global warming Our hardest challenge is effective coordination If we can solve that one, we can solve all the other ones pretty quickly

ralusek 2y ago
Trust me, a minimum of a bipolar world is much, much better than a monopolar one.
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  Until your family is killed in a proxy war I guess
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Pax Americana has been the most peaceful era in recorded human history.
quickthrowman 2y ago
Sure, that’s theoretically possible. You just need to eliminate resource scarcity (and/or human nature) and then your plan will work. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > You just need to eliminate resource scarcity Well, we are very close to that. So I guess, yeah, let's move that way. (At least until fast-growing populations appear from the fringes and refuse to integrate into the main memetic pool. That one is at least centuries away, so yeah, let's move that way.)

StarterPro 2y ago

If our politicians worried more about helping out their people instead of hindering their perceived enemies, then we might actually get somewhere.

rbrtdrmpc- 2y ago

Can’t really assess the quality of a pay walled article, but HUAWEI non capability to meet security criteria is something that was proven by someone very close to me (high school buddy working as a secirity specialist for counterspionage agency in Italy) This evidence was mostly used as leverage to lower unit of piece cost by the government for low risk devices, whatever you get by my factual experience is up to you

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Works where archive.md is blocked: https://beta.economist.com/briefing/2024/06/13/americas-assassination-attempt-on-huawei-is-backfiring https://beta.economist.com/briefing/2024/06/13/americas-assa...