The title is based on a false premise that apparently has nothing to do with the content of the article.
Is there no author listed for this article?
First of all, the US had no plans on eradicating Huawei. They explicitly tried to limit Huawei’s international and especially US expansion as a delaying tactic while the US refocused on and invested in chip tech and domestic tech production. That succeeded. They were very clear that the US lack of support for Huawei was a result of Chinese corporations being legally compelled to collaborate with their government, which is indisputable, proven and ongoing.
There was no stated intent to eradicate Huawei.
Backfire? China’s economy has been severely disrupted, their tech sector is not catching up despite truly massive investment in chipmaking and other sectors and the US has secured a technological alliance with the most advanced chipmakers in the world and funding for them.
The rest of the content of the article rehashes years old news tangential to China technology but nothing that has to do with eradication or backfiring and pretends the old tech news is relevant or new information, which I’m not seeing.
China is trying to develop new hardware and software. That is a security threat given repeated cyber attacks by Chinese corporations and the prominence of chipmaking in modern technology.
Their failure in developing these innovations during the past decade to an international competitive advantage is not proof that any “eradication” that never existed has “backfired”.
The Economist does not typically list individual authors on their articles.
Oh, okay. Thanks.
https://medium.economist.com/why-are-the-economists-writers-anonymous-8f573745631d
I actually like that reasoning, that what is written is more important than who wrote it.
This article is so poorly written and reasoned that I was curious, though.
News articles without an author and date shouldn’t be allowed to be posted. The legitimacy of news sources goes way down without those.
I mostly agree, although this particular case was my ignorance showing.
I’ve never noticed before that economist articles don’t list their authors.
The economist uniquely states on their website that they deliberately don’t post the author s for their articles because many of them are collaborative and they think that the content of the article should be more important than who wrote it.
Which in most cases is a very admirable mission statement, but can obviously be frustrating in cases like this where you want to hold a party responsible and the only recourse is to wait for a possible internal investigation by the new source themselves.
There are obviously a lot of pros and cons there, and I’m not. Convinced that the cons outweigh the pros, but at least they aren’t deliberately hiding this specific author. The economist authors publish from anonymity as a matter of course.
The thing everyone warned would happen happened?
The real lesson from the article, is:
“that which doesn’t hit one sharply-enough to kill one, IF one is relentlessly adapting, THEN it makes one stronger.”
Which is exactly why our sanctioning of Russian operations & oligarchs was sooo ineffective: we waited ages before doing it, did it layer-by-layer, & gave them warnings & time-to-adapt, to mitigate the effect of our action.
Sorry I can’t remember which journalism it was that pointed all that out, but it wasn’t my insight, it was someone else’s.
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There is no good strategy or good outcome with Huawei. CCP virtually controls any Chinese economic entity and has appetite for “secrets” of the West. Embracing Huawei would’ve been as bad as outcasting it. We’re at the point where I hesitate to buy most things that originated in China.
So, I’m not exactly well versed in all this, could you fill me in on what threats Huawei poses to I, a random poor person going about my day in the US?
I refuse to believe a Corp or the NSA isn’t already looking over my shoulder, and with nothing to steal, wouldn’t using Huawei tech be like picking between McDonald’s and Wendy’s? Same product, different flavor sort of situation?
I’ve read that DJI drones periodically send an encrypted data-payload to China, of the sites they’ve been, & what their camera has seen, as 1 little example.
I’ve read that chips whose implimentation was completed in China had extra logic added into them, to backdoor them, so that the computers they were put into ( the were networking chips ) could be entered by whomever had the backdoor key.
IF you have China make your infrastructure, and China declared last-century that “the destruction of the West is the midwife of Chinese dominion”, THEN you are handing the CCP the keys to your empire.
Modi, in India, has “bet the farm” that Russia will fight with it, provisioning India with military-means, to fight China … but Russia’s now an economic-vassal-state of China, so that can’t even be possible … which means that India has now bet its life on … nothing.
Delusion, including self-delusion, isn’t strategy.
Don’t think it goes only 1-way, though:
Do all the cars in Canada have remote-kill-switches which their manufacturers can activate? TTBOMK, yes, they do.
Apparently collection-agencies & banks use these, sometimes… & the police want the complete access to the same kill-switches…
Diebold voting-machines which were involved in some absurdly-obvious vote-manipulation, complete with coded-in back-doors, a few years ago, are another example: US company, helping highjack US elections.
There is good reason why security-geeks prefer Abloy physical-discs locks to electronic “locks”, where security is required: disc-key locks are not “bumpable”, & they have no back-doors or battery-for-security bullshit.
The brainwashed-by-propaganda just invest in the “security” that is pushed on them, endlessly, removing all alternative from the market.
That many Ukrainians still rely on Telegram, a Russian operation, for their “secret” sharing, is proof of non-viability of entire-populations of humankind.
Platforms are predators/parasites, & that includes hardware as well as software.
The world isn’t operating for humankind’s benefit: humankind is corporate-narcissism-machiavellianism-psychopathy’s prey.
Same as humankind is oligarchy’s prey, same as humankind was monarchy’s prey.
Ever since agriculture put-in-place a stable feudalism/class-system, then it’s been the same polarization-trying-to-extinguish-all-alternatives ( like there being any middle-class who has self-determination ), everywhere.
There’s a profoundly important book by Thom Hartmann, called “Screwed”, whose beginning ( the only part I’ve read ) SHOWS how national-economic-strength ONLY exists when the majority of the population is economically-autonomous ( ie a strong middle-class ), and FINALLY I understood economics, because all the “economics” stuff I’d read, until that, contradicted something fundamental…
it isn’t economic strength, when the majority are crushed-prey!
That the majority of the population need to be doing-well for the national economy to be doing-well,
is completely contradictory to the “so long as the top stocks are doing well, & the wealthy are doing well, THEN the country’s thriving” gaslighting, of normal “economics”.
Anyways, cynicism is a more-useful, more survival-oriented default, nowadays, evidence shows…
https://cdml.com/dangers-of-chinese-made-smart-devices/
https://semiengineering.com/chip-backdoors-assessing-the-threat/
The BIG problem, is that it COST$$ to even discover if one’s chips got trojan’d in Chinese manufacture, & if one has to choose between profit vs security, profit nearly-always wins, in moneyarchy.
So, it only “becomes a problem” when it’s discovered by someone, out in the wild.
And THAT means that we’ve globally rejected “prevention is cheaper than cure” paradigm, opting-instead for “we can’t afford to prevent, so if a cure is needed, our magical-Entitlement-power will save us, of course”, which is relying-on-bogus-belief, instead of relying-on-integrity.
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