Considering the whole point was somewhat shortsighted pain to China (in that long term this forces China to build a world class chip foundry now), it makes perfect sense. Huawei (and by extension China) is not going to be able to produce as many chips as competitively as others.
Planning to do it soonish, vs ‘must do it immediately and a 100 billion dollar industry is on the line’ are pretty different looking endeavors IMO. It moves up timelines and forces reprioritization of funding and other resources on a massive scale.
Still might not work though, and with this ban it makes the stakes much higher for China if it doesn’t.
China were planning wasn't the right word. It should be "they were already dong it" . They burned through 100 Billion ( USD ), NAND and DRAM are coming up soon, although whether they are competitive remains to be seen. When DRAM and NAND were extremely pricy they could afford to have low yield, low quality NAND and DRAM and sell it at break even, now the market is back to "normal" they are back to where they were. All of that was from 2013 - 2018. Way before Western Media even had their radar on the industry.
No the point was to protect national security interests by making sure that Huawei devices were not used in our infrastructure so they couldn’t back door us. It was implemented with a heavy-handed “don’t do business of any kind with Huawei” sanctions regime. In retrospect, supplying to Huawei should have been allowed.
So why pressure other countries to drop Huawei too? The UK and EU countries previously thought Huawei's presence in their 5G infrastructure was a manageable security risk, until the US pressured them. By all means, it appears to be a "starve the beast" campaign to delay or deny China technological primacy in 5th-gen telecoms, and hinder the "China 2025" agenda in general.
> Among other reasons, it’s a bad idea to let allies, with whom you share intelligence
That's a non-sequitur: classified information is not transferred unencrypted over public networks. Isn't it a little conceited to think other countries are unable to make their own intelligence assessments, when presented with facts? The reasonable conclusion is that the considerations went beyond just security - because the UK in particular had published a public version of a report on 5G security vis Huawei. Ultimately, the decision to drop Huawei was top-down,from politicians, after a lot of diplomatic pressure from the US, and not from career intelligence people, some whose day jobs I assume includes threat assessments.
You’re right that nobody (hopefully) is transmitting sensitive information in the clear, but having a network layer that you don’t trust fundamentally changes your security posture for the worse.
For example, consider the possibility that your 5G equipment might go down at an inconvenient time if there’s an actual military conflict.
Also, it’s not always clear what information has strategic value to your rivals. Even simple metadata, like which political leaders are talking to whom, can be revealing if collected at scale.
What a lost opportunity though. Taiwan and USA could have made an exception here on some made up grounds and then back-doored the Huawei silicon.
(Not saying they should do this, but that it is something they would do and it’s odd that they didn’t.)