2023-09-09 04:33:23
Enraging Americans is as easy as a phone call. Washington has dug up the technological hatchet against a smartphone: the Huawei Mate 60 Pro. Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on China, called on the Biden administration on Thursday, September 7 to purely and simply ban all exports to the Chinese telecoms giant.
The day before, Jake Sullivan, the American president’s national security adviser, had affirmed that the United States would launch an investigation as quickly as possible to understand how the Huawei Mate 60 Pro came to be.
Small garden but high fences
All this for a smartphone? “This cinema is a bit ridiculous, isn’t it?” under interrogation Alex Locolumnist for the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post.
In fact, the North American reaction is equal to the surprise caused by the announcement at the end of August of the release of the Mate 60 Pro. For Washington, the new flagship of the Huawei range should simply not exist.
It represents a snub to the sanctions imposed in 2019 by Washington on the Chinese company, perceived in the United States as a threat to national security. These sanctions were written with the specific aim of preventing Huawei from obtaining the technologies necessary to achieve precisely what the Mate 60 Pro’s spec sheet indicates: a phone equipped with a next-generation processor for 5G connectivity.
The 2019 sanctions “concerned a limited but very specific number of components for which the United States had established very strict rules in order to prevent anyone from selling them to Huawei”, summarizes Ming Du, director of the Center for Studies of Chinese Law and Politics at Durham University.
This is what the Americans called the “small-yard high-fence” strategy – a small garden to designate the reduced number of products concerned, but high fences to symbolize the severity of the sanctions.
Hence the dismay of the Americans, who wonder if someone really took these components out of the small garden to supply them illegally to Beijing. Indeed, “Huawei has been stingy with details regarding the characteristics of its phone, of which we do not really know whether the processor in question is really entirely made in China or not”, underlines Zhongdong Niu, specialist in law and technology. Chinese studies at Napier University in Edinburgh.
Sanctions that fizzled?
The scenario of violating US sanctions would, however, probably be an easier snake for Washington to swallow than the alternative. The Canadian site TechInsights was able to dissect a Mate 60 Pro and concludes that all the essential components appear to be 100% “made in China”. “This is a major geopolitical challenge for countries that have sought to restrict access to disruptive technologies,” summarizes the site. These results have not been confirmed by an official investigation.
With just one phone, China would have succeeded in reshuffling the cards in the technological war between Washington and Beijing. In just three years, it has demonstrated its ability to become technologically independent from exports of Western equipment.
“What may have surprised us was the speed with which China manufactured its own computer chip,” notes Zhongdong Niu. But it was illusory to think that Beijing would never achieve this without external help, adds this specialist: technological independence has been a goal pursued since the early 2000s. Especially in the field of electronic chips, which are central to development. of most future technologies, such as electric cars or 5G telephone networks.
The 2019 sanctions against Huawei represented one of the main weapons in the US arsenal to prevent China from catching up with the West in this area.
The Mate 60 Pro would prove that these American efforts were short-lived. The sanctions were, however, not in vain: “Without them, Huawei would have made an even more pronounced leap forward. We must not forget that after 2019, the brand’s smartphone manufacturing was almost shut down “, underlines Qing Wang, expert in marketing and innovation at the University of Warwick.
But the obstacle now seems to have been overcome. “If the chip is indeed Chinese-made, this phone undermines a theory that has long dominated debates in the West according to which Chinese companies are only capable of copying products, but not of innovating. This is why the Americans believed that by preventing exports of Western technologies, they would block China,” summarizes Ming Du.
Victory for Xi Jinping
This smartphone also illustrates “an unexpected and negative consequence of these American sanctions: the multiplication of supply and production chains,” notes Zhongdong Niu. Before 2019, there was only one, optimized according to each other’s advantages: labor costs in China, design of high-tech components in the United States, etc.
Then, Washington managed to force Beijing out, which did everything it could to find an alternative. From now on, “there is a logistics chain dominated by the United States and another by China, and the two work less well separately than together,” assures Zhongdong Niu.
But the Huawei Mate 60 Pro case is not only economical. Politically, “it is a way for Xi Jinping to demonstrate that his model of state capitalism can succeed as well, or even better, than the Western alternative,” assures Ming Du. Indeed, Beijing can argue that it is by mobilizing “all the country’s resources – state aid, industrial know-how and popular fervor for the new telephone – that China managed to overcome the sanctions”. underlines the expert.
For him, the consequence of the release of this phone risks being “an acceleration of the technological war between China and the United States”. On the one hand, Washington will seek to update its arsenal of sanctions to increasingly isolate Huawei. On the other hand, Beijing, reinforced in its capacity to produce cutting-edge technologies 100% in China, “will react more strongly to American sanctions”, believes Ming Du.
The iPhone in the crosshairs
The Chinese have already started to raise their voices. The government has reportedly banned some civil servants and employees of large semi-state companies from using iPhones, the government said. Wall Street Journal et BloombergThursday September 7.
Beijing has not confirmed, but these simple rumors have caused Apple’s stock to fall by more than 6% in two days on the New York Stock Exchange. Such a ban, if proven, “would prove that China is no longer afraid of responding to the American ban on the sale of Huawei phones in the United States with a similar measure against the star American phone manufacturer”, underlines Qing Wang.
But for this specialist, China has no interest in the technological war getting too tough. First, because “as number 2 behind the United States, it has more to gain and learn by collaborating with number 1,” she assures.
Then, because it is not enough to demonstrate its ability to manufacture a 100% Chinese latest generation chip. We still need to “be able to build enough to satisfy all the demand for the latest Huawei phone,” notes this expert. In other words, you must have access to the necessary components in large enough quantities to satisfy the huge Chinese market. For Beijing, it would be easier if it could import even part of it.
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