I’ve been watching Li Yuan since she was at the Wall Street Journal. Now with the New York Times in Hong Kong, she has emerged as one of the smartest commentators on U.S-Chinese tech tensions. In this piece today, she says Chinese companies such as Huawei–which is in the line of fire from the American government–suffer from “the Chinese curse”–meaning the government of Xi Jinping insists that all Chinese companies must serve the Communist Party.
She writes: “Because China has an authoritarian government that believes the Communist Party should control everything, and everything in the country should serve the interest of the party, it is nearly unimaginable that any Chinese company can say no to government requests, especially if they are made repeatedly and in the name of national security.”
As long as that is the case, the Americans are right to suspect that allowing Huawei to be involved in building the next generation of telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, so-called 5G, would give the Chinese party-state a back door into the world’s 5G networks.
