concerns that TikTok could share user data with the Chinese government. For example, the National Security Law, enacted in 2015, states that citizens and enterprises have the “responsibility and obligation to maintain national security.” The 2017 National Intelligence Law declared that Chinese companies must “support, assist, and cooperate with” China’s intelligence-gathering authorities. officials also point to vague Chinese laws that could be used to force Huawei to help the government with intelligence gathering. While there is no evidence that this has happened at Huawei, Beijing has taken a stake in an entity owned by ByteDance, the parent of video-sharing monolith TikTok. Foreign news organizations have also reported that the government could start pressuring tech companies to offer the party direct ownership stakes and give party members even greater roles in management. In recent years, state-run companies and local governments have invested more in private firms. Experts have observed that the CCP is working to boost its influence over private industry, especially tech companies. Under President Xi Jinping, the lines between public and private have become even more blurred. Executives of many of the biggest companies are party members, including Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma and Huawei founder Ren, who served as an engineer in the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution. The government has considerable sway over Chinese private companies through heavy regulation, including the requirement that they establish CCP branches within them, and state-backed investment. How much sway does Beijing have over tech companies? Justice Department, which later dropped the charges against her. In 2021, she reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Meng was detained in Canada in 2018 at the request of the United States, which was seeking her extradition. A federal indictment unsealed in January 2019 against Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and Ren’s daughter, said that Huawei defrauded banks in order to do business with Iran and obstructed justice in the process by destroying evidence. The United States claims that Huawei has violated sanctions on Iran and North Korea. According to the indictment, these violations allowed Huawei to “drastically cut its research and development costs and associated delays, giving the company a significant and unfair competitive advantage.” Justice Department charged Huawei with racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to steal trade secrets. jury found Huawei guilty of stealing intellectual property from T-Mobile, and in 2020, the U.S. (The suit was later settled.) In 2017, a U.S. companies and global telecom firms have for years accused Huawei of stealing trade secrets, starting with Cisco’s 2003 lawsuit alleging that its source code appeared in Huawei products. But it is difficult to trust Huawei, given the relationship between companies and the Communist Party.” “Once you have those risks, you have to trust the company much more. It’s much harder to separate the core from the periphery,” says CFR’s Adam Segal. “5G is a different type of risk versus 4G or 3G. intelligence chiefs, including the directors of the CIA and FBI, cautioned Americans against using Huawei products, warning that the company could conduct “ undetected espionage.”Īt the heart of Washington’s concerns is 5G, the latest technology standard for cellular networks, which provides faster download speeds for smartphones, connects devices in smart cities, and supports autonomous vehicles and robots. national security interests.” In 2018, six U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report concluded that using equipment made by Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese telecommunications company, could “undermine core U.S. nuclear arsenal.Ĭongress began receiving warnings about Huawei as early as 2012, when a U.S. military communications, including those about the U.S. In 2022, an FBI investigation found that Huawei equipment can be used to disrupt U.S. (The United States has not publicly provided evidence that this has happened.) There are also concerns that Huawei’s 5G infrastructure could contain backdoors that allow the Chinese government to collect and centralize massive quantities of data and give Beijing the necessary access to attack communications networks and public utilities. Officials, primarily in the United States but also in Australia and several other countries, point to intentionally vague Chinese intelligence laws that could be used to force Huawei to hand over data to the Chinese government. intelligence agencies, is that the Chinese government could use Huawei to spy.
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