China syndromeU.K.: Parliamentary Opposition to Huawei’s 5G Deal Growing Significantly

Support in the British Parliament for allowing Huawei a role in Britain’s 5G network is collapsing.

In January, the U.K. government granted Huawei approval to supply 5G technologies for parts of the U.K. network – with some restrictions, which critics of the deal say are meaningless.

Richard Altieri and Benjamin Della Rocca report in Lawfare that the government’s plan requires an act of Parliament to take legal effect, and the opposition to the deal among members of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has been steadily growing.

When the government in March made its initial presentation of the plan to Parliament, a Conservative-majority had voted down an amendment which would have barred Huawei from participating in U.K. 5G, but the amendment garnered a not insignificant support from Johnson’s own party.

Fortunereports that the government had hoped to win over Tory rebels with an information campaign about Huawei ahead of the yet-unscheduled vote in Parliament on the Chinese company’s involvement in the country’s 5G infrastructure, but “two people familiar with the government’s thinking now believe that a hardening of positions among rank-and-file Conservative MPs will make it difficult — if not impossible — to get the legislation passed.”

Last week U.K. lawmakers expressed near certainty that a law allowing Huawei to provide 5G components to Britain’s 5G network would not now pass Parliament. A government spokesman, on 16 April, stated, however, that there has been no change in the government’s plan regarding Huawei.

The Washington Examiner reports that the discernible shift in parliamentary opinion against the deal has been driven by concerns over the way China has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Politicians and scientists have openly charged not only that China has been less than transparent from the start, but that it has engaged in active dissembling, misleading the WHO and world government about the nature and ferocity of the coronavirus epidemic.

Many countries were unprepared for an epidemic, and many governments botched their initial response – chief among them the United States, on both counts – but China’s lies and deceptions exacerbated the crisis.

U.K. lawmakers, already leery of China, are uneasy about allowing Huawei, given its close ties to the Chinese intelligence and military establishments, access to the U.K. communication infrastructure, and the duplicity of the Chinese government over the coronavirus has only deepened this unease.

One lawmaker described the shift within Parliament is an emerging “shared realization” of the risks from a “business that is part of a state that does not share our values.”

Altieri and Della Rocca write that concern over China’s handling of the pandemic has heightened suspicion in the U.K. about Chinese technology policy generally, even apart from Huawei. On 7 April, for example, a U.K. minister intervened to halt a Chinese investor’s bid—which U.K. regulators had previously cleared—to take control of British chip producer Imagination Technologies. The former head of British intelligence agency MI6 advocated stopping the takeover, citing “deep rivalry” between China and Western nations over control of technology.

Altieri and Della Rocca note that similar suspicions of China’s technology policy, and of Chinese investors taking over domestic tech firms, are mounting across Europe, as analysts observe that European tech companies, given the economic slowdown, are “vulnerable” to takeovers—many have experienced significant stock-price declines this year.