ArgumentAllowing Our Infrastructure to Be Infected by Huawei Is a Far Bigger Risk Than the Coronavirus
The government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, defying heavy pressure from the United States, on Tuesday announced that it would allow Huawei access to the U.K. 5G communication infrastructure. “Imagine the situation the other way round,” Charles Moore writers. “Would China allow a British or American company to get itself near the heart of its secret systems? Of course not. The Huawei case is actually worse than that, because whereas British or American companies have independent lives of their own, a country like China does not. Huawei is an arm of the Chinese state, and Beijing would never allow it otherwise.”
The U.K. National Security Council, which met on Tuesday, 28 January, to approve access by Huawei to the U.K. 5G communication infrastructure, has a history vis-à-vis the Chinese company, a history which is not reassuring. Charles Moore writes in The Telegraph that when the U.K. NSC first involved Huawei in the U.K. 4G network, British officials seemed to have seen it as so uncontroversial that they did not even tell ministers it was happening. “They let Beijing’s Trojan horse within our walls and patted it admiringly on its flanks,” he writes. “So those same officials, including the current Cabinet Secretary, Sir Mark Sedwill, now want to press ahead with Huawei for 5G, almost as if nothing had happened.”
The preferred solution of the U.K. NSC seems to be a compromise in which the U.K. takes “non-core” bits of Huawei, “although it is highly contestable whether there is such a thing as ‘non-core’ in this context,” Moore notes.
Imagine the situation the other way round. Would China allow a British or American company to get itself near the heart of its secret systems? Of course not. The Huawei case is actually worse than that, because whereas British or American companies have independent lives of their own, a country like China does not. Huawei is an arm of the Chinese state, and Beijing would never allow it otherwise. That state remains, despite all the reforms, a one-party, totalitarian system.
Indeed the present condition of the Chinese Communist Party seems to be reverting in its leadership cult, its ultra-secrecy and its hostility to exterior powers to the mindset of the Chairman Mao era.
The headlines just now are all about the dangers of the coronavirus coming out of China. The Huawei virus will infect us much more widely and far longer if we let it.
Boris Johnson’s Government, post-Brexit, is understandably eager to turn Britain into a place of global tech innovation. But it could quickly resemble the emptiness of Harold Wilson’s “white heat of the technological revolution” in the 1960s if it rushes unthinkingly forward.
If it rushes into the embrace of China, we shall have lost control.
