A Little Chinese History

Today, John McKinnon at the Wall Street Journal describes a recent case of Chinese history in an article about The Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to block sale of Chinese equipment used in rural areas of the US because that equipment poses a national security threat to the infrastructure of communications in general.  Better late than never, as the saying goes.

Included in that article was one about Huawei that was written in 2012.  That was about the original Congressional investigation of Huawei and why the Congress felt that Huawei and ZTE were risks to the national security and their acquisitions in the US should be curtailed.  That article is historical, but interesting from the standpoint of the stated reasons for the concerns.  Both were considered to be capable of some damage to national security of the US.

You may remember that David Sanger at the New York Times said in 2014 that the National Security Agency went further than just guessing whether Huawei was actually doing this kind of thing.  According to his account, NSA acautally got into the computers at Huawei and were poking around.  Nobody was surprised at the accusation, and little to nothing was said about it at the time because Edward Snowden was the source of some of the documents describing the NSA actions and there were plenty of things to talk about that overshadowed two Chinese companies.

Fast forward to trade disputes with China and you have the ingredients for a clampdown on Huawei and ZTE, those two named in the Congressional inquiries in 2012.  Notice that China has not denied any of these claims, allowing the two companies to speak for themselves.  The more publicity they give to the claims against the two of them, the worse it will be in international markets.  In the meantime, the US wants to see where Huawei and ZTE have already made inroads.  It will take years to make a dent in that.   They are going to be looking at cloud security next.  Perhaps the Chinese curse, May you live in interesting times will apply equally to the Chinese.