Huawei
Over the last decade or so, the western world watches Huawei’s rise as a formidable world-power with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Huawei Technologies was founded as recently as 1987 by Ren Zhengfei and has made headlines of late as the target of the US government, which claims its telecom equipment poses a threat to America’s national security.
White House officials have been desperate since the Obama years. It was a sputnik shock, and most Americans follow the media with much anti-Chinese xenophobia. In the quest to block Huawei’s forward march, Donald Trump blacklisted Huawei and other Chinese tech companies from trading with American companies, hoping to bring them to their knees, as White House had done to ZTE a year earlier.
“Break his leg, break his leg,” Donald Trump shouted at a front runner Huawei in a marathon, “you just have to break his leg. He is a threat to our security.”
Then one from the crowd rushed forward and crushed at the front runner with a bat. It hit him, but the runner came off, limping, hopping. He continued slower, stumbling but gradually speed off.
Analysts have warned of the “Thucydides Trap” — an invisible law of geopolitics dating back to the ancient wars of Sparta and Athens that a rising power and a waning power inevitably meet on the battlefield. Russia and China are named as the greatest threats — more than international terrorism — nations that want to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests.
The old Soviet Union had collapsed, and Russian influence has waned, but China remains sticking out like a sore thumb.
Huawei, without access to Google’s Android operating system and, most importantly, Play Store and other Google services, would be like a death sentence. It is not lack of OS that would debilitate Huawei, but without apps, smartphones are not worth its value.
Even giants like Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon have failed to sustain their operating systems because app developers were unwilling to build apps for new ecosystems. Huawei is no exception, and it was expected Huawei would fall on its knees, but China has called for self-reliance in order to offset the impact of US regulations.
Since then, mainland companies with their “wolf culture” are aggressively poaching talent, forcing China to facilitate the development of indigenous innovation and self-sufficiency in critical technologies.
Naturally, America is still the top dog, and they’ll fight for the throne against any upstart. But what Trump had done has its unintended effect. By barring Huawei, it is spurring domestic innovation to be self-reliant. Huawei is fervently working on an alternative to Android – Hongmeng – and there are chances that it might become, like iOS, and is rumoured to be 60 percent faster than Android. If so, and if Huawei makes its OS easily available to other operators, that may be a death sentence for Android.
Joel Huan
The Mystery of Ephraim 