Huawei’s ties to China’s military aren’t problem

At first blush, the optics of Huawei Technologies Co. staff working alongside China’s military aren’t great.
Company employees teamed up with various organs of the Peoples’ Liberation Army on at least 10 research endeavors over the past decade, spanning artificial intelligence and radio communications, Bloomberg News reported, citing publicly available documents.
Among the joint projects: extracting and classifying emotions in online video comments, and an initiative with the elite National University of Defense Technology on collection and analysis of satellite images and geographical coordinates. Just the types of surveillance research that most rattles the West. These aren’t even core areas of Huawei’s telecommunications business, which only raises more questions about the depth of its relationship with Beijing.
Corporate-military research collaboration isn’t a novelty. It happens in almost every country. The problem is that the Shenzhen-based company has spent considerable time and energy trying to weaken any perception that it’s tied to the Chinese government.
“We have no cooperation with the military on research,” founder Ren Zhengfei said to reporters in Shenzhen in January, according to a transcript Huawei provided to Bloomberg News. “Perhaps we sell them a small amount of civilian equipment. Just how much, I’m not clear on because we don’t regard them as a core customer.”
The US has long been suspicious of the equipment maker’s connections to the Chinese government, and has taken steps to hem in the reach of its 5G technology, citing national-security concerns. In recent months, the Trump administration has pressured allies to block the company and barred US manufacturers from selling equipment to Huawei, among other Chinese firms.
Supplying superfast connectivity beyond Huawei’s domestic market has been lucrative. While there’s still plenty of business – even US allies such as the UK and Germany haven’t excluded Huawei completely – any scaling back of those ambitions threatens this growth momentum.
That’s why, if Huawei’s ties to the PLA aren’t nefarious, greater transparency would go a long way. AT&T Inc., for example, has well-disclosed contracts for work with the US army. Alphabet Inc.’s Google had a drone contract with the Pentagon, before opting not to renew it after employee backlash.
Now Huawei is left with three choices: deny its ties to the PLA, play them down, or claim ignorance. Judging from its initial response to the Bloomberg News story, it seems to have opted for the last choice. Should this shift to denial, Huawei’s credibility worldwide might diminish.
That leaves “playing it down” as the most likely strategy, including the classic block-and-bridge tactic of trying to reroute questions, or shifting focus to US examples.
—Bloomberg