Chinese ambassador to UK threatens to withdraw Huawei, £3bn investment if comms giant banned from building 5G China's ambassador to Britain has threatened to withdraw Huawei and several billions in investment following the government's decision to ban the manufacturer's products from 5G mobile networks. An op-ed attributed to Liu Xiaoming and published in the South China Morning Post this morning said: "In 2018, the company announced …
Read the article, there's no threat and there doesn't need to be. It's just a straightforward observation: investment will be "subject to uncertainties". Why wouldn't an overnight collapse in the market for Huawei kit affect their investment decisions here?
That's for the company to say, not a government official. Presumably the ambassador feels empowered to deliver news on behalf of Huawei and equally presumably, there's a reason for that feeling of empowerment.
If there was ever a way to give the UK government the amunition to further curtail sales opportunities this is it.
Oh, that's nothing. Don't forget the Chinese influence in other areas.
They hired senior former civil servants and former MP's to "advise", which one could look at as being an inducement to the people now in the post when they indicate that they are always hiring for more talent, but "We do feel really very strongly about X decision and would like you to reconsider".
Press agencies can obviously be bought outright, and universities basically ditto by signing up huge numbers of Chinese students because "we really value your higher education." [But only when you agree with and support our policies].
Fail to do so?: This is outrageous and we aren't going to let you evil imperialist monsters poison the minds of our students and so will not be allowing anybody else to attend! Hence, public support or silent acquiescence from academia.
And that's what's obvious. It would be interesting to see exactly how much Chinese support has been bought over the last couple of decades and exactly how much they can control our political decisions.
I do sincerely hope that the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) will employ their own people for translation and critically and technically assess the relevant documents to a higher level of assurance than they would otherwise. Can't afford a FAA/Boeing 737Max type relationship/certification regime, and the readership here are no stranger to "interesting" translations of operating instructions from Chinese dialects to other languages.
And by employing their own people, let's hope they don't retain the services of Homer J Simpson either.
Who are weHuawei to say
When to say goodbye
Or to wonder why we two must part
With thanks to Sigmund Romberg and Gus Kahn
ref: https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107859133474/
The US government tells US companies who they can sell to. This is different because?
They are also threatening (no other word for it) Germany over Nordstream 2, which is all about keeping the US fracking industry going while hurting Russia.
Pot, kettle.
I suspect that message isn't intended for consumption in the UK. It is a warning to other countries. I could imagine somewhere like South Africa is under pressure to do the same thing but a cost of several billions of investment might cause them to think twice.
> I could imagine somewhere like South Africa is under pressure to do the same thing
You would think that South Africa would automatically be siding with requests to ban Huawei
After all that Britain and the USA did to create the modern ZA don't they owe us some fealty ?
It was only a month ago that Huawei announced their new £1bn site in Sawston (just south of Cambridge), which would create over 400 high-tech jobs. Looks like that's being used as a bargaining chip.
Of course, they can recoup a decent chunk of change by building a massive housing estate on the 500-acre site now that Boris is loosening up the planning laws.
Yes but, no but.
The new plant? Yes we need high-tech stuff, but please don't tout it as a way of creating jobs.
Better to invest £1 billion of public money to create jobs by investing in small, locally-owned startups and expanding businesses. Invest the money as equity, and vest that in a local community trust, so that decisions are made that benefit the community, not distant shareholders, and prevents a sell-off to a big competitor who will close them down, or relocate.
Yes, some will fail, but many will still be there and employing people in 10-20 years time, long after the Huawei site has closed. Massive investments by big firms aren't any help in the long term.
That way, you could probably get 5-10,000 jobs for a billion.
And the next thing your local CCP official does is say that they will protest this by having nominally independent Huawei withdraw 3 billion Pounds in planned investment in the UK!!
You're kind of proving Huawei foes' point there, Mr. Ambassador! Now China is stuck on this issue. Either they A) have to prove that Huawei really is independent, by letting it continue with a large majority of the planned UK investment, thereby making the Chinese Communist Party lose face, or B) they follow through with the threat and drive a dagger into Western governments' and telecoms carriers' perception that Huawei isn't ultimately a front for the CCP.
I'm sticking with B), because Beijing can't appear to lose face on this, but doing that is just going to hand ammo to Huawei foes around the world. This would have worked much better if China QUIETLY cancelled the planned investment in the UK.
Sorry Huawei, not your fault your Government are lying fascists.
Hey, maybe you should register Huawei (UK), float it on the UK stock market and transfer all your fsck-ing assets over here before your passports get revoked. You will find friends waiting.
Solved. A sign I recently came across:
You are right. It's all fake. We've ruined the whole economy just to convince you to wear a mask.Because you are ugly.
My personal observation confirms that most if not all people look better with a mask over their mouth and nose.
So this might be one of the reasons why the US is leaning so heavily on Huawei, but Xiaomi, Alibaba etc are getting off at least for now.
Huawei from what they say (and it appears to be backed up by non Chinese employed throughout the world) is a co-op. You can't buy shares in the company unless you are an employee, so your suggestion is basically a nono unless the company has a fundamental restructure.
I imagine some of the money men are pretty livid that one of the most successful recent tech companies is basically out of their reach!
The wording quoted in the story can easily be read as the Ambassador commenting on the likely thought processes at Huawei. Any tech journalist could have written "Unfortunately, this will now be subject to uncertainties"; that's not a threat, that's a risk assessment.
While I'm very sure that the Chinese Government has substantial influence over Huawei, this is not the smoking gun other commenters are suggesting.
Well it's easy to have a keenly priced, cutting-edge product that meets your customers' needs when you don't have to spend as much on R&D, instead just "acquiring" much of your know-how from your competitors.
AC because I suspect the Sinophile trolls here, who have no response other than whataboutery ("but you can't criticize China for brutal repression in Tibet/Hong Kong/Tiananmen Square/the Uighur homeland/etc because Trump! Brexit! Boris! herp derp derp") will downvote me, but we know it's true.
The issue is not Chinese industrial espionage (the Americans do it at a far larger scale via their various carnivore data harvesting programs) but a will to build better products at a more reasonable price point. Chinese IT wares were no great shakes fifteen years ago, but they have been improving quickly over the last ten years. Packaging and industrial design have been improving in the last five years.
This is the result of many years of companies all over the world racing to find the cheapest production costs over anything else. Too many companies appear to be run by accountants who do not understand that sometimes there are otherthings aside from cost that should be looked at.
Staff are NOT an overhead, they are (or should be) an ASSET. Treat them well and they will serve you well. Treat them like dirt (IBM, ORACLE etc I am looking at you) and you are digging your own graves.
This is also the result of countries NOT looking strategically about retaining some sembelance of internal manufacturing capacity. (ARM, the steel industry. I am looking at you). Quick fire sales of national assets is usually a short sighted view. Why in the hell are we allowing china to build a Nuclear reactor in the UK, this should be a UK or at minimum European project.
How many things can we Actually produce inside the UK without outside resources. Probably nothing.
Correct. This is the result of greedy short-sighted CEO's and shareholders making a quick buck by outsourcing everything to bring costs down while steadily increasing consumer prices. In addition inexperienced, incompetent or downright corrupt politicians have allowed this to happen with no regulation or strategic control. As a result local manufacturing has all but disappeared - apart from a few small and obscure boutique areas (like satellites or luxury sports cars - tiny industries which are always promoted as some sort of amazing success). We have also lost or are losing basic industrial capabilities - things like steel production or even creating electricity, again mainly due to cheap low quality imports and politicians not viewing these capabilities as essential national assets required for our long term security. At the same time people's living costs have been increasing but their income has more or less stalled. It's become a race to the bottom.
This is no accident. China views the west as an adversary and the majority of their industries are on the whole controlled and subsidised by the state. They are playing the long game and are gradually ensuring that other nations become dependant on them with no local alternatives. Eventually all of our governments will be taking orders from Beijing under the threat of having the plug pulled.
The idea of having the Chinese (or any other state) build nuclear reactors in our country is insane, but it's happening... crazy times.
All this stuff about China playing the long game, and having a cunning plan, is very flattering to the Chinese Communist Party. But if they were so good at foresight, how come they unleashed a global pandemic on the world by locking up the doctors who warned them it was happening?
And then having made that ultimate fuck-up, spent ages denying it and getting all threatening. Then even refusing to allow Taiwan observer status at the WHO meetings. Which has probably undone 20 years of bribes to smaller countries to get them not to recognise Taiwan - and may well be the catalyst to get Taiwan back into a lot of international organisations that China has so far been successful at blocking them from.
Not to mention trashing a perfectly viable looking system of long-term leadership change - where the CCP changed half the Politburo ever 5 years - and thus the entire leadership every 10 - which was a great way of avoiing falling into the trap of total inflexible dictatorship and constant purges. That looks like the most short-termist policy of all.
The South China Morning Post is a reliable bastion of Chinese Communist Party propaganda intended for consumption by Western audiences, having been bought by Chinese eBay-a-like biz Alibaba five years ago. Despite its nominally Hong Kong roots, today the newspaper largely trumpets whatever China's Foreign Office wants the world to think about China.Dose Mr Corfield actually read the South China Morning Post or does he, as would seem from the comment cited above, simply rely on US State Department handouts ? One may differ about interpretations, but I expect greater concern with the fact from the Reg
scmp.com so refreshing when coming from European and US based media outlets, finally not everything is centered around the braindead theme "climate change bad, orange man bad, climate change bad, orange man bad....." It is amazing to read articles written by smart journalists when used to repeating non-sense created by creatures with an IQ of 50 or lower.
If scmp.com is the product of the CCP and western mainstream media is the result of a capitalistic free market, then the latter is a big fail.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
