Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The Geopolitical Fight Against Huawei | Tech Won't Save Us

Transcript

The Geopolitical Fight Against Huawei | Tech Won't Save Us · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the people, the workers, the consumers in both countries and around the world that are being exploited by corporate interests and by national security interests.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that is part of the sadness that these techno-nationalistic and state capitalist rhetoric are foreclosing the political and moral imagination in terms of thinking about what are these communication technologies actually for?
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to TechOneSave Us Made in partnership with the nation magazine.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Paris Marx, and this week my guest is Yang Yang Cheng.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yang Yang is a research scholar in law and a fellow at the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Yang Yang has been on the show in the past, but I wanted to have her back because we talk a lot about these major American tech companies, right?
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Amazon's, the apples, but we don't talk nearly enough on the show about these major Chinese tech companies.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: which are not just global firms in their own right, but have increased sleep and drawn into this geopolitical battle between the United States and China, which means that we should have a much greater understanding of what they are, what they do, where they come from, and that's why this week I wanted to discuss Huawei.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Which is a company that you might know from, you know, its phones and tablets and things like that if you're in a market where those are sold, but it's actually a major telecommunications company in the sense that it makes a lot of the kind of switches and underlying hardware that allows us to communicate with one another around the world.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: At this point, it's one of the four dominant firms creating these kinds of technologies, Huawei and ZTE are the Chinese ones, and then you have Nokia and Ericsson in Europe, and those four companies are kind of the major players in this space now.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a new book, recently, from Eva Du, called The House of Huawei.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: which I'm in the process of reading and finding really fascinating to learn about the history of this company.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I read a review that Yang Yang had written of the book itself that kind of drew in some of these perspectives that are certainly in line with those of the show in how we approach technology.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I thought it was a good opportunity to not just discuss Huawei, but to discuss how it fits into this geopolitical battle and how it also reveals some of those hypocrisies of the United States.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: When it accuses China and Chinese companies of potentially spying, but then actually engages in a lot of those things itself as well and part of its reasoning for wanting to limit the global scale and ambition of Chinese companies is so that companies that are more aligned with its security apparatus are the ones that are still dominated in these telecommunications spaces and thus letting it in to be able to surveil communications around the world.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's actually funny, on this point, after we had recorded this interview, Donald Trump gave an interview to Fox News over the final weekend of June, where he was essentially asked about China hacking into telecom systems, stealing intellectual property, all of these sorts of things, and saying, like, how can we negotiate with such a bad actor?
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Trump just very, very matter of factly said, you don't think we do that to them.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: We do.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: We do a lot of things.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the way the world works.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a nasty world.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while there are so many things that I hate about Donald Trump, it is interesting the moments where he's just very honest about the fact that the United States engages in all of this skullduggery that it says only the most nefarious countries on the world.
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's enemies, of course, are up to you.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that this is a really fascinating conversation with Yangyang where we learn more about Huawei itself.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Certainly, there is so much more that we could have gotten into in this conversation because there's so much to be said about this company that can't really fit into one, you know, fifty minute episode of a podcast.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I do hope you enjoy it.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do hope it helps to fill you in on this history.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously in the show notes, I'll put a link to Yangyang's review, but also Eva Dow's new book if you do want to check that out.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you do enjoy our conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform with choice.
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can also share the show on social media or any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so we can keep having these critical in-depth conversations that are increasingly taking a more international focus as we seek to understand more of this wider world and the impacts of this tech industry.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can join supporters like Laura from Durham, North Carolina, Solomon from Brooklyn, Eb in Glasgow, Scotland, Charlotte in Halifax, Braden in San Francisco, Colin in Sunderland, and Mallory from Remfruit, Ontario by going to patreon.com slash deck won't say about where you can become as a supporter as well.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, again, welcome back to the show.
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm really excited to talk to you again.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, you know, discussing China is always something that I want to do more on the show and I often don't get to as much as I think would be interesting, especially because of, you know, how important China and Chinese technology is in the discussions that we're increasingly having about this industry and you know, the the wider kind of world that we live in.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I wanted to have you back on the show because you wrote this really fascinating piece, basically reviewing a new book about Huawei.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is one of the really important Chinese tech companies.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And especially when that has been brought into these broader geopolitical debates between China and the United States or China and the West more broadly.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I thought that this would be something really interesting for us to dig into, to not just understand the company, but this kind of broader geopolitical debate.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: even better.
• 5:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I was thinking, you know, just to start for people who might not be so familiar with this company, could you talk to us about what Huawei actually is?
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: What this company does?
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, it's significance within the Chinese technology landscape.
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it is really interesting because for for someone of my generation, I think what I first heard about Huawei was in the mid or late, two thousand when I was in college and it was like, oh, there were schoolmates who went to work at this big Chinese telecom company, but it wasn't considered like particularly prestigious or glamorous, it was just like a job and and so it's really interesting to see how a decade on it became
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: pushed into this geopolitical spotlight on one hand and becoming this national champion on the other.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: However, the company itself actually had a rather humble beginning.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it was founded in nineteen eighty-seven by this former Chinese soldier by the name of Gendren Fein in the city of Shenzhen on a sudden coast just across the border from Hong Kong.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it was as part of China's earlier transitions from a collective economy to embrace the capitalist market.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so one could really see the four decades of Huawei's development as a way to mirror these four decades of China's development, both in terms of its transition to embrace a capitalist market and its rise in the global capitalist hierarchy.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Huawei started on the answer to Telecom market in the very beginning, partly on as the rent and fame itself would say out of Navitay, because that was seen as an open and lucrative market, because of a scarce phone coverage in China.
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It has faced fierce competition within China itself.
• 7:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's main business at the beginning.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even now is producing telecom equipment like these phones, which is and these kind of not particularly glamorous things.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it started as a subcontractor.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: assembly products for other companies, but one of the things that really distinguished Huawei and Andrew and Facebook's business approach from the very beginning is part of its ambition and its emphasis on unrestriction development that the rent did really want Huawei to have its own technology that is seen as a way for the company to achieve longevity, not just short-term profit.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it developed its own phones, which at the other received Chinese state approval in the mid-ninities, but it was still a rather humble company at that point through the nineties.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And partly because of the fierce domestic competition,
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another thing that distinguished Huawei was that he ventured overseas rather early on.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was partly also because of a business decision that the domestic competition was really fierce and venturing overseas was seen as a way that was essential for.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: for the company survival.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it was partly out of these on bold business decisions and partly was also that it had reliable and good communications technology that it developed and so up until the early two thousand while we had stood out.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: as one of the leading telecom companies in China.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was starting to establish, make a name for itself in overseas markets as well.
• 8:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then around twenty-time, that was when Huawei entered the smartphone business.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was when its public profile probably raised that it was no longer being seen as only this.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: bulky outdated like company not outdated but in terms of just like not very glamorous but then we would enter the smartphone business and like started Johan said made one of its ads it was been really brandy itself as one of the hip tech firms on that is also brandy tough to both a younger generation of customers and overseas market
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Both its business expansion and its global expansion, coinciding with China's overall economic rise, as mentioned earlier, also led to this process of intense geopolitical concerns raised over Huawei.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And some of these are concerns where indeed valid, that of course as a telecom company, it also produces a lot of surveillance equipment, including surveillance cameras and other types of equipment.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: for not just the Chinese market, but also in overseas market.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is a legitimate concern in terms of its potential security vulnerabilities.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think it was tapped into a broader geopolitical dynamic in terms of intense US China.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: economic rivalry that Huawei's global ambitions is being seen as part of Beijing's overall geopolitical ambitions.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is some of the things that listeners in the West would probably be familiar with that Huawei was constantly in the headlines over the past several years over various kinds of surveillance concerns over intellectual property.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Seals including different types of sanctions that the US government had slapped on around the
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that gives us such a great concise understanding of this company that we're going to be drilling into even further through the course of this interview.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as you say those things, right?
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's that public profile, it's the kind of making of smartphones and devices that people would be using as well as then seeing the Western and particular U.S.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: sanctions and issues with Huawei.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That would probably be what people often associate with, right?
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: much more behind the scenes business, the ones that is it's more primary business is the thing that people will be less familiar with but that is really important to understanding the company and its origins.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so there are a number of things that I wanted to dig into that you were talking about kind of earlier on in the company's history so that we can gain a better understanding and then we can dig into these kind of bigger geopolitical issues.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted to go back to that transition in China from the planned economy to the market economy
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what it means for a company like Huawei to be founded in that moment, particularly when you're looking at a company like ZTE, which is a big competitor of Huawei's and is state owned or partially state owned, whereas Huawei is set up as a private company early on.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what does it mean to be kind of starting a private company in that moment?
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: What does that mean for Huawei to be founded in a particular moment like that?
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is such a great question.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I feel it is really interesting because there is a lot of these misconceptions about Huawei as if it would somehow like the Chinese government had laid this golden egg, like full day of case ago and then tried to like cultivate it across full day of case to have it like expand overseas and then Xi Jinping has like a kill switching his office that he just like pushes a button and all Huawei equipment overseas was shut down and that's how like Beijing would take over the world and it's after
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I feel like I feel like whenever like a Chinese company is successful, that has to be the image that we receive of it, right?
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like obviously this is created by the Chinese government and they're doing it for only the most nefarious reasons.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: There can't be any other potential motivation or business driver or anything like that.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's quite interesting because, well, it's true that Renchenfeiser, his first job was in the Chinese military, but it was a very humble position, and it was not that unusual for a man of his generation, born in the nineteen forty's, to join the military during the Mao era as just like a career path out of at the time with very few options.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that military career was often being seen in us, oh, that is proof that he has this particular tie with the Chinese state.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that is not the case.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what is also really interesting in terms of this China's transition after the Mao era, from socialism to market capitalism, and part of that transition also embodied with drastic cuts in defense spending to focus more on economic development rather than national defense.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because of that, it led to a number of things that are closely tied with the founding of Huawei and Ren's personal career was that his former, or he was an army engineering soldier that engineering court was suspended as part of this transition, this reduction in military spending.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so he was dispatched to Shenzhen to work out a state owned oil company that he didn't like and he soon floundered out.
• 13:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: However, there were these new experiments that are being set up including at the Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen that had a pilot program.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: that allowed on private Chinese citizens to just set up tech firms as an experiment.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they could experiment, they could succeed or fail, but that's on their own.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as I mentioned earlier, I ran during phase and a couple of his earlier business partners chose the field of telecommunications because
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: that was seen as a very wide open market with a lot of business potential.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what is also very interesting at this moment with telecommunications because it has this technology component.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also it was indeed a market that needed equipment and capital to fulfill this need.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was one of the first fields in China to open up to foreign investment.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this, in terms of investment, is not just in terms of capital investment, but also in terms of technology transfer.
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that reflected a broader view on industrial policy and technological development in the Chinese state at the time, was that an important technology from the West in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the,
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: achieve domestic capabilities.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the Chinese government actually favored foreign firms and gave like tax breaks and other types of favorable policies to increase foreign firms to come invest in China including like foreign telecom companies to invest in the Chinese market.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for foreign telecom companies, it was of course being seen as a wonderful business opportunity.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at that time, there was this saying back in the nineteen nineties that the Chinese telecom market was called a seven countries and eight systems.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was eight companies from seven different countries, US, European and Japanese firms that had their own products and they were setting up joint ventures.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: and they are joined venture partners are usually Chinese state owned entity.
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so these were the companies that initially had the upper hand in the telecom market in China.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a private startup like Huawei was very much the scrappy kid on a blog that was trying to just like survive and make a name for itself.
• 16:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what was also very interesting at that time was this type of foreign tech transfer was being seen as a faster, more convenient way.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: to enhance domestic technological capabilities, but it was not a very creative way.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were Chinese engineers and Chinese business people who had ambitions that actually exceeded the state's main policy.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: in times of they wanted their own technology, they wanted to innovate.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it was very much a Chinese-like, private-driven effort, not a state-directed effort at that time to develop their own switches, develop their own telecom technologies.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a major player in that and then coming back to this cut in military spending.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this reduction in defense spending also the Chinese government
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: basically told the military, right?
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like on one hand, there is this cut in defense, then on the other hand, you can go find your own ways to make money.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so there was this encouraging military personnel to research, to use technology with commercial prospects.
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: as a way to have additional income.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so there was this group of military researchers led by this military engineer by the name of Wu Jiangshin, who led an effort to develop a homegrown telephone switch.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: This was named the O'Fource, which by its label, that was invented in nineteen ninety-one.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at that time, because
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a military research team, even though they were being encouraged to develop commercial technologies, they were not capitalist and were not so much aware of and were not incentivized to guard their intellectual property.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so the designs of the zero force, which was actually widely disseminated across China, including two Huawei and ZTE.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And partly through the military network, partly just through technological diffusion.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it also helped Huawei develop its own switch that I mentioned was approved in nineteen ninety five.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is a long history, but I think there is, there are really interesting points that resonate a lot today.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: On one hand, I want to mention one anecdote with when
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Wu Jiangshin team was developing the zero forest which in the late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late, late,
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: across the border from from Xinjiang to get these old chips.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, they designed this distributed computing architecture to achieve the same calculation capabilities using the last advanced chips.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so there is a lesson here about innovation under conditions of scarcity.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, there is also this question about intellectual property and whether or not guarding intellectual property is necessarily understood as the way to incentivize innovation.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We saw, like in the nineteen nineties, on one hand, the broad dissemination of the design of the zero force which was in some ways maybe seen as a blunder that the Wu team did not protect this intellectual property.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, it also helped incentivize a broader innovation ecosystem within the Chinese telecom community in general and helped spend a lot of different types of products that were built on the basis of the zero force, which were inspired by the original design.
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: on one hand in terms of the technological capabilities.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, it also lowered the cost of telecom communications equipment in China and helped facilitate the development of the overall telecom industry.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you talk about the zero four switch, I feel like that is an interesting opportunity to have a deeper talk about intellectual property, right?
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because I feel like, you know, this is one of the often big issues that comes up when we talk about Chinese tech companies and the accusation is always that the only way that Chinese tech companies have been able to grow is by kind of stealing the intellectual property of the West and then just kind of replicating it and building off of it.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wonder what you make of those accusations, because certainly reading this book about Huawei by if I do basically what you see is at certain times there are questions about how Chinese chips resemble some Western chips.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lawsuit from Cisco against Huawei later on, which I believe is about routers or something like that.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I guess this broader question around intellectual property and this accusation that China's advances only through stealing Western intellectual property.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wonder what you make of that in relation to Huawei in particular.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is really interesting.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I also think a lot of this is about narrative and perception.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: We mentioned earlier like write this perception of Huawei in Western discourse that is very much divergent from its actual humble origin story.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when it comes to innovation and invention, I think there is often this kind of perception that invention is something that just like burst out of nowhere that is just this stroke of genius in an genius in the visuals mind.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then that intellectual property legislation and like IP regimes or
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: used to protect the fruits of genius of these individual minds.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that is very much not the case either for how innovation actually takes place.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nor is it actually reflects the actual purpose and effects of a lot of these intellectual property regulations.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: legal regimes.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when we think about, there is a really wonderful book called Emulation Innovation by Brook Hindu.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was actually based on the earlier part of US history.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that one is to remember was a lot of times that the dominant narrative is not the one that is the closest to the truth.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: The dominant narrative is the one that is being invented and disseminated by the ones in the greater positions of power.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when the US was by itself a developing country and European countries had the more advanced technologies actually US industrialists and inventors also emulated in some ways also aggressively acquired a European designs and machines and
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: skilled workers to the US at times in violation of European immigration export controllers.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then later based on this emulation process, US inventors and engineers also made improvements upon the original designs.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's how innovation is this incremental process that is always built on what has come before.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is how
• 23:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: technological developments have taken place in Europe, in the US, and also in China.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as I mentioned earlier in China, because partly related to
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: its own political development and the context of the Cold War.
• 23:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were indeed long periods of relative isolation from the US-led West during the Mao era.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so during the reform era, when the Chinese government opened up its markets and welcoming foreign technology and foreign investment, loved the foreign firms were eager to invest, not just invest in Chinese markets.
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But also transfer part of their technology so long as it's not the most cutting edge the ground rules to Chinese partners because that was seen as a good business strategy to take advantage of the Chinese labor and consumer market.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that is a very important thing to keep in mind when we talk about
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: innovation, intellectual poverty, is what is the actual purpose of it?
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think one analogy on a Western listener might be more familiar with is, for example, the history of like between PC and a Mac.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: An Apple and IBM took very different approaches where Apple decided that only Apple can make Macs.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: While IBM decided that other companies, whether it's compact or have doubt or he would packer, can also make PCs
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: So long as they can pay a royalty share to IBM, that was seen as a good business strategy.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is an important thing to keep in mind when it comes to innovation, intellectual property protection.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And another part that is important, which we kind of like jumps ahead in a timeline a little bit, we're still in a, in a, in a nineties when Huawei was a starter.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if we talk about Huawei now as a global telecom giant,
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Another thing that is really interesting to understand is that Huawei itself holds a lot of patents.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's, I think, the most patents among any Chinese firm, and it also lists really high up there among global firms, and it's by itself very litigious, including in the U.S.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: market.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's not just as a defence, it's also as a plaintiff.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: to defend its own intellectual property rights.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so in a lot of these ways, Huawei actually, even though it is a Chinese company, it behaves very much like any of its Western-Origent global companies in terms of treating its intellectual property.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that brings me to my final point is a lot of times nowadays, wanting intellectual property in terms of commercial intellectual property is being discussed.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: How it has been defended, where the boundaries are drawn, is not so much about who came up with your original idea, but is really about who is most motivated and committed to expand and has the resources to expand to defend it.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, especially thinking about power in both instances, right?
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thinking about the things you were saying originally in your answer and then what you ended with, where it's kind of like the companies that are going to be the largest, the most global are going to be most incentivized to try to defend this intellectual property, but whether it's companies just getting started or even countries that are lower down the totem bowl, unlike the kind of
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: level of technological advancement or whatnot, they are going to be incentivized to kind of move up that poll just as you were saying with the United States early on in its own history, making sure that it was kind of learning from the more advanced ways of doing technology in other parts of the world as well.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like that's a good transition to talk about telecommunications technology and the importance of kind of controlling technology and all those sorts of things.
• 26:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I just wanted to touch on one thing before we do that, which is
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like when you're in the West, you know, you will occasionally run into communists who want to say, you know, Huawei is actually great because you don't understand that it is an employee-owned company unlike many other, you know, Western companies or many other global companies that are, you know, these publicly traded kind of, you know, owned by shareholders, those sorts of things.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was interested in having you discuss that a little bit.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, what does it actually mean for Huawei to, you know, have a lot of it stock owned by employees?
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: How was that related to this kind of early founding of the company in the transition from the market economy?
• 27:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And does that actually mean that employees kind of control the company?
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, what does that mean in practice for a company like Huawei?
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is really, really interesting because I think before I get to the specificities about Huawei, one thing is China is really like if anything, it is proof that a country ruled by a nominally communist party
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: can be more inscrupulous in global capitalism than a lot of countries that does not have a socialist history.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it is really interesting.
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And in a lot of ways, Chinese firms have even more cutthroat capitalist competition than some of its Western counterparts.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then coming back to Huawei.
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think one of the things is, as we discussed earlier, it's comparatively humble beginnings and birthing out of this moment of sociopolitical and economic transition in China, out of like a relatively chaotic and elastic regulatory environment, led to some of its quirks in terms of its company's management and ownership structure.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it does not mean that Huawei is somehow like accounting that
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is good for the good of its employees is actually extremely exploitative and an unabashed Lisa.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so one of, as I mentioned earlier, like one Huawei was a private start of its competitors were much better equipped in terms of Chinese state capital and foreign investments while Huawei did not have those advantages.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: One thing did have an ambition.
• 28:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so Yan Zhenfei and with very aggressive in terms of recruiting on tech talent,
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: to join the firm, but it was not able to pay its employees in full.
• 29:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it came up with this scheme, which was to convert part of the salary that it owed employees into company shares, which was like these non-volting stock options.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was really interesting that this is something that would happen to them, but would probably be seen as an illegal fundraising today in a more formalized corporate regulatory environment in China today.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also, while we was founded in nineteen eighty seven, as I mentioned, it was as part of this tech startup pilot program in the special economic zone in Shenzhen.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then through it nineteen nineties, it also changed its structure at various points up until nineteen ninety seven when it became a limited liability corporation.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was partly also because of this regular to re-transition in China as a transition from social planning to a market.
• 30:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: economy.
• 30:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so some of these were legacy factors.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: However, Huawei is, as I mentioned, unabashedly exploitative of its employees that is returning to its company bylaws into its various kinds of corporate propaganda material.
• 30:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: It claims that it's also this way that there is no job security at Huawei, no matter how long a person has worked at Huawei, no matter what one's
• 30:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: past contribution is one could get fired if one couldn't keep up.
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there was even like a kind of stunning story about how there were these new laws coming in in China that would give, I believe it was people who would be at a company for like a decade, additional kind of rights and things like that.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so a bunch of workers, thousands of workers at Huawei resigned and took their jobs back in order to reset their clocks so that they wouldn't have these protections effectively.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this was the the two thousand eight the Chinese and you a labor law.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so when a random failed at this employee is to preempt that before the law could take effect.
• 31:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in late two thousand seven are another six thousand Huawei employees, including like and also random himself symbolically like resigned and then reset their costs.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is, I think it is important that one criticizes capitalism and Western corporations is also important to have a realistic understanding of what this situation in China and not project once fantasies and imaginations on another country and that is very far removed from reality.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, and this is why I like speaking to you about it as well, right?
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because you're giving us a very clear eyed picture of what is going on.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not just trying to say, oh, China is amazing because it's China or anything like that.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like some of the stories about the treatment of workers in this book are just really stunning and the degree to which people are experiencing health effects because of the long working hours and the stress and those sorts of things and the expectations and demands that come from the company, even not just in the early days, but even progressing
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: to the point where it is becoming this kind of global, you know, major competitor in the telecommunications landscape, this expectation of excessive work culture coming right from the top from rent himself.
• 32:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, he is also engaging in this as it's described, it is really stunning.
• 32:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that is in some ways, it was, it has been a contributing factor to always corporate success.
• 32:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: The way it exploits its workers when you think about it, right?
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: In a telecom market, especially in terms of its overseas expansion, Huawei is able to outcompete a lot of its Western rivals because it would be able to send its workers to
• 32:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: dangerous situations, whether it's conflict zones or an immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, where telecom equipment need to be restored or repaired.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It would have its workers were longer hours, it would send more workers to a single location, and it would also be able to keep the cost comparatively lower.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: This kind of exploitation is good for the company in time, self-disclable competitiveness, but it is not.
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: a distinct like corporate model that I should emulate?
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, absolutely.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it feels worth saying as well when we think about these Silicon Valley corporations, one of the things that we often observe about them is how they want to set up a kind of set of perks that are going to encourage their workers to stay at the office even longer and kind of this culture that expects long working hours.
• 33:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is just kind of framed and done in a very different way than what we see.
• 33:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: at a company like Huawei, but still the expectation is, you know, they want to get people to work longer hours because it is going to be of corporate benefit.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Huawei's executives also, like, it's corporate literature, have also, like, so can admirably of the long-working hours in Silicon Valley, including the so-called mattress culture, where employees sleeping their offices and have a mattress below their desks and such.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: fascinating yet as no surprise right of course they would do that but I did want to pivot as I was saying to talk about these broader geopolitical and technological issues right one of the things that really stood out to me even when you look at like the early days and when China is you know improving its telecommunications technology once you know its market is opening up and things like that
• 34:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: is the focus on the argument that it is important for a country like China or kind of any major large country in the world to control its own telecommunications technologies.
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can you talk a bit about why large countries see it as important to want to control this technology to not be using foreign telecommunications technology in this way and what the incentive is there?
• 34:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think when it comes to telecom technology, it is really interesting because on one hand, it does require a degree of technological capability and investment to develop one's own.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, it is also a critical infrastructure that doesn't just have commercial implications, particularly implications.
• 35:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think when we think about development of telecom industry and technologies in China, I think there needs to be a place into context that that lot are tied with China's historical development at different junctures.
• 35:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so if we just look at what I mentioned earlier, right, in the first of all, when telecom
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: market with one of the first markets in China to welcome foreign investment, both capital investment and technology transfer.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is an area where the Chinese government certainly saw this need for foreign technology to come into the Chinese market to fulfill this domestic need.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I mentioned, because it is a lucrative field, not just for foreign companies, but also for the Chinese state owned partners.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so at that time, in early stages of equipment development, a lot of the incentive was indeed to
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: continue with this kind of foreign investment joint venture model.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the most prominent examples is probably a Shanghai Bell, which is of course a joint venture between the Belgium Bell, a telephone manufacturing company and a state owned entity in Shanghai.
• 36:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And up until the end of the twentieth century, a Shanghai belt was actually the world's largest manufacturer of this specific type of telephone switches.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it had a lot of domestic manufacturing capacity.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, that kind of reliance on foreign tech transfer and joint ventures was always uninstufficient.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was insufficient in terms of the private ambitions of Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it is also insufficient in terms of the security dimension.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that, of course, also has a historical element to it that the Chinese, of course, Chinese Communist Party, when it was not just nominally communist, but indeed communist as a revolutionary party, it came as this guerilla warfare out of conditions of extreme scarcity.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And self-reliance was very, very important in times of the parties own identity and partly as part of a national identity that was through the Mao era that there was a strong emphasis on self-reliance and self-sufficiency in times of science and technology.
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is not purely out of ideological reasons, but also serves a pragmatic purpose.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: partly because of Cold War era embargoes, and partly out of this security concerns that self-reliance and self-sufficiency is important.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that dimension has always been present, but whether or not that dimension is dominant, really depends on a specific historical period and what are the domestic and international conditions that weighs on Beijing's calculus.
• 38:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I like to pick up on that as well because I think you laid that out really nicely and basically what we start to see as China opens up to the world is a number of events that encourages it to think more in relation to self-reliance and to be, you know, skeptical of this relationship with the United States, whether it is
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: the kind of nineteen ninety nine embassy bombing that the united states engages in that obviously you know has a lot of serious effects with how Chinese people relate to the united states you know especially given as you were saying you know kind of this long-standing hostile relationship between the two countries
• 38:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then, of course, as well, if you're thinking about telecommunications in particular, the revelations in the Snowden leaks that Huawei's network had been accessed and compromised by the National Security Agency in the United States, and they were able to
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: gain access to all these conversations and things that we're going through always.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Network, can you talk about how that also kind of increases this desire for self-reliance and this pressure for China to develop its own technologies rather than being reliant on US technology?
• 39:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it is a great question, since you pointed out these two different time periods in nineteen ninety nine with a bell grade bombings that are where U.S.
• 39:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: missiles hit by accident as the U.S.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: government on a assist while a lot of the Chinese public are not convinced.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Snowden leaks, which was happened in the early twenty-tenths, what has changed dramatically over this course of about fifteen years is China's position in terms of global capitalism.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so if we look back at nineteen ninety-nine, China was not yet a member of the World Trade Organization.
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what was actually quite ironic was right like weeks before the Belgrade Embassy bombing.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then Chinese Premier Duongji had just visited the US with a list of concessions that the Chinese government were willing to make in terms of its domestic trade and market policies as a way to earn the US's approval for China to join a WTO.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at that time, the Chinese government was also encouraging the domestic firms both state-owned enterprises and private companies like Huawei.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: to enter the overseas market to experiment, but also as a way to show goodwill that China is really honestly trying to become a responsible player in global capitalism.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But this was when China was still very much on the periphery of global capitalism.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: and what the Belgrade bombing, and that was a national wound, and it would reveal to a lot of Chinese people the imbalance, the inequalities of a world system that the Chinese, their country has been trying so hard to be a part of.
• 40:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what has happened over the next fifteen years, up until the point of the Edward Snowden, at least with China, has indeed emerged from the periphery to
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Inching closer to the core, I guess, until the early twenty-tenths in global capitalism, and also the twenty-eight global financial crisis, was also a shock to the Chinese leadership in terms of seeing the vulnerabilities of the U.S.
• 41:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: economy and a Western capitalism, and that was also an incentive in terms of self-realized and self-sufficiency.
• 41:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what really happened with the Snowden leaks was, I guess it was twofold, right, both technological and ideological, in terms of the revelations to the Chinese state.
• 41:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: On one hand, the technological part is that the Western telecom equipment had inherent vulnerabilities, and the US government had the technical capability to infiltrate effectively any telecom that's working around the world, including Huawei's and now just in terms of surveillance, but potentially to sabotage as well.
• 41:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, the ideological part is that the US government has this capability and is willing to use that capability.
• 42:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then there is no particular reason to unilaterally disarm or just trust its Western counterpart on a Chinese state spot that is really important that it's not just an economic incentive and it's not just in terms of national pride, but it's really a matter of national security to be able to have domestic technologies in terms of these critical infrastructures.
• 42:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to pick up on that, right?
• 42:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And dig into it a little bit further, because obviously when we look at the United States and its accusations against Chinese tech companies and Huawei in particular, one of the things that they often argue is that the reason that Chinese tech companies need to be restricted, you know, the reason why Huawei needs to be banned from US and Western telecommunications networks is because of this threat
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: of Chinese surveillance and Chinese spying, right?
• 43:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That China could tap into these telecommunications technologies and then kind of listen into what people in the West are saying or that China could use TikTok to get all of our data or what have you.
• 43:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like one of the kind of values of the argument that you're making is not so much to say China would never theoretically be able to do something like this, but rather the United States can do this.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does do this.
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It seems like quite a hypocritical stance to then say it wants nobody else to be able to do this thing that it is doing to everybody else and not willing to stop doing.
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I think I think the question is never whether or not Huawei assists states surveillance that
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: That answer is in the affirmative, but the point is Huawei doesn't just assist Chinese state surveillance.
• 43:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It also assists state surveillance in other countries.
• 43:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's willing to sell its surveillance technologies to any country that's willing to buy it.
• 43:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: On one hand, on the other hand, Huawei certainly not alone in terms of selling surveillance technologies to any country or any individual entity that wants to buy it.
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think what is important here is not to defend Huawei, which shouldn't be defended in terms of its complexities and its actions, but in terms of actually having a correct diagnosis of the problem, that this is not a problem that is unique to Huawei, it is not a problem that is unique to
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Chinese firms and it's not a problem that is unique to companies that bore out of an authoritarian system.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is really a problem that is inherent to surveillance capitalism or capitalism in general.
• 44:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can think about security concerns with telecom equipment along these three categories.
• 44:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: The first vulnerability is technical, which should be company and country agnostic.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: This means whether or not this equipment
• 44:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: itself, the hardware of the software itself has some kind of vulnerability that can be exploited.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that can be evaluated in a company and country agnostic way.
• 45:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a technical evaluation.
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I know there are like different evaluations of Huawei's equipment and not getting to the details of that.
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that is a technical assessment.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: The second type of potential vulnerability is regulatory, which is not in terms of the equipment per se, but in terms of
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's say the data that has been collected by this equipment and during its collection, storage and transmission, whether there are different regulatory loopholes that means this information can be exploited, can be sold to others, parties and
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: data brokers and such and exploited in other ways, right?
• 45:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: But these are regulatory vulnerabilities that they're not enough oversight.
• 45:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not enough restrictions in terms of the exploitation of information that goes through telecom equipment.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that by itself should also be company and country, it's not stick.
• 46:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: that regulations should, if it needs to be effective, they cannot just target one company or companies from one country.
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: But a lot of these discussions about potential surveillance and security concerns with regards to Huawei are very much removed from the questions of technical or regulatory vulnerabilities.
• 46:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: but is falls only into the third category, which is geopolitical.
• 46:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's very much about US China relations, about concerns over China's economic rise.
• 46:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the US, including why we see some of these very diverse security assessment between the US security establishment and its traditional allies in, like saying, in the UK and in some European countries.
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: where they do use Huawei equipment and do not come to the same degree of security concern or evaluation as US does.
• 46:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at times the US government has basically pressured its allies to remove Huawei equipment from their networks.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at times we also see other geopolitical questions such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has raised the security alarm bells in Europe.
• 47:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that has extended
• 47:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: to more alarms and more scrutiny over Chinese equipment like Huawei's equipment as well.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: But these are our questions that actually do not immediately touch on the technical or the regulatory aspects.
• 47:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not saying that geopolitical concerns are not valid, but they are not the way to understand what are the actual vulnerabilities that come with telecom equipment and telecom infrastructure in general.
• 47:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a really important point and a really good way to put it.
• 47:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I really just wanted to end off by asking you about something that you wrote about near the end of your review of this book, The House of Huawei, which is, you know, you were really talking about how tools of communication do not have to be inherently technologies of capture.
• 47:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do not have to be used in these ways that we hear our governments talking about being concerned about, but then they're also often engaging in.
• 48:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can you talk about this aspect to it and what you see as the potential of these technologies and how to overt them being used in these kind of very harmful and concerning ways?
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: One thing that concerns me greatly on over the past few years with regards to this discourse, as I mentioned, a lot of these questions that are technical or regulatory questions about technology and surveillance capitalism are being captured by this techno-nationalistic great power rivalry framework.
• 48:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the actual
• 48:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: problems are being obscured or skewed and the diagnosis is skewed and then the solutions actually do not address the real issues such as like ripping out Huawei's equipment doesn't really address the problems of surveillance capitalism.
• 48:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what has become really interesting is Huawei has become a lot more popular in China over the past several years.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no longer just a successful Chinese firm, but it's now becoming seen as a symbol of Chinese pride that is under siege from like evil Western imperialist.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: For example, like my mother who doesn't care about brands or anything at all, like she now insists that she would only use Huawei cell phones.
• 49:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, and I can understand, like it's, it's all, it become like it's not just like a commercial choice, but it's becoming an ideological one.
• 49:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I definitely understand that being in Canada today and you know, the increasing Canadian nationalism in response to, you know, the threats from Donald Trump and wanting to buy Canadian and all those sorts of things.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I'm sure that's a, that's a common thing around the world when the perception is that anything related to your country is under threat and you kind of like rally around it.
• 49:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then to that extent, it is, in some ways, like, of course, like I don't
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: criticized my mother's consumer choices, she can use whatever products, she wishes.
• 49:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there's overall nationalistic rallying around a company like Huawei in some ways is sad.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it thinks you mentioned the nineteen nineteen nine bell grade embassy bombing.
• 50:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I that there was also a rallying around these nationalistic symbols is heightened nationalism in China in immediate aftermath, even though back then it wasn't rallying around.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: a commercial company is rallying around the symbols of the state.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then of course, it's the symbols of an authoritarian state that also suppresses its own people.
• 50:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so nowadays when one sees these very nationalistic rhetoric from Chinese people around Huawei, but then Huawei also exploits its workers, which still predominantly Chinese workers, it also
• 50:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: South surveillance technology to Chinese companies that helps with surveilling the Chinese population.
• 50:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like Huawei is not like good for the Chinese people.
• 50:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is I think that that is partly the sadness that we see some echoing of that say here in the US where this great power competition is being used
• 51:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: as a way for US tech firms to argue against regulation that they shouldn't be regulated because they need to freely compete with Chinese state champions like Huawei, even though it's not really a state champion, at least not in the beginning.
• 51:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so then it's still like the people, the workers, the consumers in both countries and around the world.
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: that are being exploited by corporate interests and by national security interests.
• 51:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that is part of the sadness that these techno-nationalistic and state capitalist rhetoric are foreclosing the political and moral imagination.
• 51:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: in terms of thinking about what are these communication technologies actually for.
• 51:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like when we think about it, communication is actually one of the things that is both so vital to daily life, but it's also something that has to dimension that is by construct this intimate and it is meant to connect people.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It does not need to be and I would argue should not be this site of extraction exploitation as the site of profit.
• 52:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So how do we imagine a way to wire up the world and to network individuals and communities
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: in a way where the infrastructure is not controlled and dominated by handful of the most powerful entities, be it a state entity or a corporate entity.
• 52:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that is the question that is, that should be asked, that is the important question rather than whether or not Xi Jinping has a secret switch to all the Huawei switches like.
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think you've put that so well.
• 52:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is inherently not just a technological question, but a political question as well, right?
• 52:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the type of political system that would enable something like that.
• 53:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I really appreciate you drawing that comparison between the United States and China to say,
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not that Huawei is the good guy against the bad Silicon Valley.
• 53:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's that this geopolitical contest between China and the United States helps these exploitative monopolistic firms on both sides that have a whole load of harms associated with them.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yang Yang, I always appreciate you having you on the show, getting your insights.
• 53:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for taking the time again to come back on Tech Won't Save Us.
• 53:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, thank you so much for having me.
• 53:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thank you for your insights of questions as well.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yang Eng-Jang is a research scholar in law and a fellow at the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center.
• 53:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tech won't save us as made in partnership with the nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Production is by Kyla Huesen.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tech won't save us for relies on the support.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash Tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.