The Spectator

Red handed

The world is a better place for China’s emergence from behind the bamboo curtain where it hid for half a century. Economic and market reforms have led to the greatest reduction of poverty in world history. For some western manufacturers, competition from low-cost China has sometimes proved fatal, yet the overall economic effect has been beneficial, helping to deliver years of global growth without the inflation which once acted quickly to snuff out the boom times.

All this arouses a protectionist backlash, especially in America, but the American case against Huawei, the largest Chinese tech company, shows how many of these concerns are well-grounded. It demonstrates what ought not to be a surprise: that the Chinese Communist party does not operate within capitalist norms, and prefers a kind of piracy.

Charges levelled by US prosecutors give a detailed account of exactly how it behaved towards T-Mobile, its US client. Huawei is accused of smuggling one Chinese engineer into a T-Mobile lab in order to take pictures without permission and deploying another to steal a part of a handset-testing robot. The US says it can prove that Huawei even instituted a bonus scheme to reward employees for stealing more information. Other serious charges relate to alleged attempts to circumvent sanctions against Iran.

Chinese companies have long complained about what they see as bias, even bigotry against them. They dislike the assumption that every major Chinese firm will bend the rules. The problem is that this suspicion is so often well-founded. For too long, there has been an expectation in Beijing that a debt-addled West will overlook all kinds of problems — from intellectual property theft to human rights abuses — to avail itself of 5G networks and various cheap goodies. But Huawei’s behaviour does now risk a far greater, and justified, backlash.

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