
The geopolitics of 5G – America’s war on Huawei nears its endgame - elorant
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/16/americas-war-on-huawei-nears-its-endgame
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mytailorisrich
> _At the heart of this is a dilemma which the West has not faced before: how
> to cope with a technology superpower whose values are fundamentally opposed
> to our own,” in the words of Robert Hannigan, a former boss of GCHQ, the
> British signals-intelligence agency._

I think that making this about "values" is a superficial reason given for
public consumption, but it is not the key and actual profound reason. Frankly
sometimes the fact that China has the regime that it has is actually simply
convenient to sell containment measures.

Whatever happens to the political regime in Beijing, China won't be part of
the West and it won't be aligned with the West. It is a non-Western
superpower, so beyond 'values' this is a different culture and civilisation,
that will seek to further its own interests in the same way as every power
does.

That, to me, is the profound issue and one that the West has not faced for
hundreds of years.

Considering the size of China, it is unrealistic to hope to keep it down.
Whatever the West does can delay China's rise and/or make things turn more
aggressive but one day the old Western world order will have to make space for
China. This obviously does not mean to bend over, but it should mean accepting
that the world changes and coming to a global understanding.

Hitting Huawei is a delaying tactic, nothing more. It will also probably push
China into developing a more independent supply chain so it's not even clear
whether it won't actually end up backfiring.

What Germany does will be interesting because I think that they are the one
European country with the most to lose if China retaliates.

