MPs have questioned whether the US’s insistence on the national security threat posed by Huawei is motivated by a geopolitical strategy aimed at eroding China’s global reach.
At a defence select committee meeting on Tuesday (2 June), Labour MP Kevan Jones cited GCHQ’s assessment that the company’s involvement in the UK’s 5G infrastructure wouldn’t pose a security threat. He pushed US senator Tom Cotton to be upfront about the US’s true motives for excluding the Chinese company.
“[…] If it is a geopolitical argument, which I accept that it is, I think that’s what it should be articulated as,” said Jones. “Because I think you and quite a lot of other people skirt around the technical aspects […] if you want to say that you don’t want China in the network, that’s fine by me; I think that’s the more legitimate argument.” Jones said that the country’s arguments about technology didn’t stand up to scrutiny.
“It’s very clear from GCHQ and our security agencies that there’s no way that Huawei equipment will come anywhere near anything in terms of our signals intelligence,” Jones said.
Huawei agreed, with VP Victor Zhang saying in statement: “Today’s committee concentrated on America’s desire for a home-grown 5G company that can ‘match’ or ‘beat’ Huawei. It’s clear its market position, rather than security concerns, underpins America’s attack on Huawei as the committee was given no evidence to substantiate security allegations.”
Cotton maintained that US security agencies think differently, pointing out that other countries like Australia and Japan have more readily excluded Huawei from 5G network development. He expressed concern that China aimed “to drive a high tech wedge” (Huawei) between the US and the UK, in an attempt to disrupt the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries.
Cotton said that for him, the technological and geopolitical issues are wrapped up because 5G is “so central to the way economies will function in the future”. He said he sees an analogy between this issue and “as if we had relied on adversarial nations in the cold war to build our submarines or to build our tanks”, despite the fact China and the US are not currently engaged in war.
In January, the UK decided to limit Huawei to 35 per cent of the British 5G network supply. However, an emergency review being conducted by the NCSC is expected to conclude that US sanctions against Huawei may compromise the security of the products it supplies to network operators. This was widely interpreted as an effort by Downing Street to prevent a backbench rebellion on the issue.
Cotton is a renowned hawk on China, stating at the committee meeting that “China is a graver long term threat to international peace and stability than is Russia”. He recently told Fox News that he believed Chinese students in the US should only be allowed to study humanities, to prevent them gaining scientific and technological expertise in the country. He also propagated a rumour that the coronavirus was manufactured in a laboratory in Wuhan. In 2017, investigative news publication, The Intercept, floated Cotton as a contender for “America’s most dangerous senator“.
At the committee meeting, Cotton defended Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organisation due to its inveterate “kowtowing” to China. One of the MPs criticised Cotton’s view – aired on Fox News last night – that the American military should be drafted in to quash the anti-racism protests currently taking place in the US.
Cotton expressed his desire that “Britain can join the United States and other powerful free nations to work together on a 5G solution that doesn’t empower Chinese intelligence”. He said: “[…] China will continue to try to replace the United States as the dominant power and to rewrite the international rules of order.”
Chair of the defence committee, Tory MP Tobias Ellwood appeared receptive to his rhetoric, asking whether the Five Eyes alliance – most renowned for its mass surveillance network exposed by the Snowden leaks – was something that could be at the core “of rebuild[ing] international standards and values”. Ellwood said: “At the moment, it’s known for sharing intelligence, but the trust that you have there, is that perhaps the genesis of advancing an Atlantic Charter of thought and setting a new construct, or set of values and norms, that we can absolutely defend?”
Cotton concurred that the deep ties between the nations could indeed be “a foundation of more than mere intelligence sharing […] whether technological standards or international political standards”.
Cotton referred to Huawei as a “criminal organisation”, because its technology is purportedly used in the Xinjiang province where the Muslim Uighur population faces oppression from the Chinese government (something disputed by the company itself). He didn’t mention the fact that US companies including Intel and HPE have also profited from technology partnerships in this region.
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