The Great U.S.-China Tech War. Gordon G. Chang

      THE UNITED STATES and China are locked in a “cold tech war,” and the winner will end up dominating the twenty-first century.

      Beijing was not considered a tech contender a decade ago. Now, some call it a leader. America is already behind in critical areas.

      It is no surprise how Chinese leaders made their regime a tech powerhouse. They first developed and then implemented multiyear plans and projects, adopting a determined, methodical, and disciplined approach. As a result, China’s political leaders and their army of technocrats could soon possess the technologies of tomorrow.

      America can still catch up. Unfortunately, Americans, focused on other matters, are not meeting the challenges China presents. A whole-of-society mobilization will be necessary for the U.S. to regain what it once had: control of cutting-edge technologies. This is how America got to the moon, and this is the key to winning this century.

      Americans may not like the fact that they’re once again in a Cold War–type struggle, but they will either adjust to that reality or get left behind.

5G AND THE INTERNET OF THINGS

      Nowhere is America so far behind China as in the race to build the world’s next – the fifth – generation of wireless telecommunications networks.

      “Not since the invention of gunpowder has China led the world in the introduction of a disruptive new technology, and the United States still can’t believe that it has been leapfrogged,” wrote David Goldman, the American writer and thinker, in Tablet in March 2019, referring to 5G. “For years the conventional wisdom held that the Chinese only could copy but not innovate. That wisdom has now been proven wrong.”

      The Chinese have raced ahead in 5G in large part because they made it “a central plank” of their industrial planning process, including it in both the 13th Five-Year Plan, which covers the half-decade ending in 2020, and the Made in China 2025 initiative. Chinese technocrats announced the addition of 5G to CM2025, as the now-notorious plan is known in China, in January 2018. Chinese leader Xi Jinping also made 5G a part of his Belt and Road Initiative when in May 2017 he announced the “Digital Silk Road.” Wireless will feature prominently in the 14th Five-Year Plan, on the drafting board now.

       A whole-of-society mobilization will be necessary for the U.S. to regain control of cutting-edge technologies.

      There is a prize for the country controlling tomorrow’s wireless communication networks. According to forecaster Stratfor, 5G is nothing less than “the technology that will drive the world’s economy in the decade to come.”

      That bold assessment is obviously correct: 5G, due to speeds 2,000 times faster than existing 4G networks, will permit near-universal connectivity. Homes, vehicles, machines, robots, and just about everything else will be linked and communicating with each other. That’s what is now called the Internet of Things.

      Imagine a world where Beijing is connected to most devices around the planet. That gives China, already “the new OPEC of data,” access to even more of it.

      And by hook or by crook the Chinese will take the world’s information. Huawei Technologies, as Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican, told Fox News Channel in July 2019, is Beijing’s “mechanism for spying.”

      She’s right. The company, whose name translates as “For China,” is in no position to refuse Beijing’s demands to gather intelligence. For one thing, Beijing owns almost all of Huawei. The Shenzhen-based enterprise maintains it is “employee-owned,” but that is an exaggeration. Founder Ren Zhengfei holds a 1 percent stake, and the remainder is effectively controlled by the state through a “trade union committee.”

      Moreover, in the Communist Party’s top-down system virtually no one can resist a command from the ruling organization. The Party’s power is even codified. Articles 7 and 14 of China’s National Intelligence Law, enacted in 2017, require Chinese nationals and entities to spy if relevant authorities make a demand. Ren has repeatedly maintained that Huawei would never snoop, but this defiant claim, in view of everything, is not credible.

      The spying concern is not theoretical. In fact, from 2012 to 2017, China surreptitiously downloaded data nightly – through Huawei servers – from the Chinese-built and Beijingdonated headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa.

      Not surprisingly, Huawei has been positioning itself to seize tomorrow’s data. First, academic Christopher Balding’s study of resumes of Huawei employees reveals that some of them claim concurrent links with units of the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military, in roles that apparently involve intelligence collection. As he writes in his July 2019 study, “there is an undeniable relationship between Huawei and the Chinese state, military, and intelligence gathering services.” Founder Ren Zhengfei was an officer in the People’s Liberation Army before being demobilized in 1983. He is a member of the Communist Party.

      Second, recent analyses show Huawei software to contain an abnormally high number of security flaws. Finite State, a cybersecurity firm, revealed that 55 percent of nearly 10,000 scanned Huawei firmware images contained at least one backdoor vulnerability. The Chinese company’s products, according to the survey, contained the most such flaws among its competitors.

      The concern is not only exfiltration of information. Beijing will undoubtedly use Huawei to control the networks operating the devices of tomorrow, remotely manipulating everything hooked up to the Internet of Things, in other words, just about everything.

      With devices around the planet networked to China, Beijing could have the ability to drive cars off cliffs, unlock front doors, and turn off or speed up pacemakers. In the first moments of a war, Beijing could literally see into most corners of the world and paralyze critical infrastructure.

      Who wants to give a militant one-party state the power to surveil and control internetconnected devices plus win wars? The answer, unfortunately, is many nations, even some friends of the United States. The Philippines, a U.S. treaty partner, has decided to buy Huawei 5G gear, and Italy, a NATO ally, is almost certainly going to make the same decision soon. The U.K., considered America’s closest ally, announced it too will be purchasing Huawei 5G equipment.