Even while much of Washington tries to practice social distancing, FBI director Christopher Wray made it a point to travel three blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the bureau’s headquarters last Tuesday for a speech to a small audience, most of them in masks. Wray has kept a low profile throughout his nearly three-year tenure as director, but the topic of his address at the conservative Hudson Institute was one he’s had no problem being vocal about, and on Tuesday he made his position clear by the third sentence of his remarks.
“The greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is the counterintelligence and economic espionage threat from China,” he told the think tank crowd. “We need to be clear-eyed about the scope of the Chinese government’s ambition. China—the Chinese Communist Party—believes it’s in a generational fight to surpass our country in economic and technological leadership.”
For nearly an hour in his speech and a follow-on Q&A with the institute’s arch-China hawk Walter Russell Mead, Wray held forth in what bureau officials called the most detailed account of the Chinese threat ever given by the FBI. “We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China,” he said. “China is engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary.”
Wray’s remarks marked the second act in what will ultimately be four speeches by the Trump administration’s national security and legal leaders about the threat posed by China’s ambitions. White House national security advisor Robert O’Brien blasted China during an Arizona speech two weeks ago, Attorney General Bill Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are scheduled to speak this summer as well.
The push by the Trump administration to elevate the Chinese threat in America’s public consciousness is partly a presidential campaign tactic and partly an overdue acknowledgement by the foreign policy establishment that years of accommodating engagement with a rising China has done little to stem China’s rambunctious and norm-shattering behavior across the globe even as it has given the country time and space to expand its economy, militarize the South China Sea, and consolidate power around the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping.
After Washington and the West largely failed with carrots for two decades, the Trump administration has turned to geopolitical sticks—a strategy that was well underway before this spring’s novel coronavirus pandemic exacerbated Chinese-US tensions. Trump has been at pains to label the virus the “Kung flu—among other racist and xenophobic monikers—even as China moved aggressively in recent weeks to curtail the traditional freedoms of Hong Kong and silence dissent on the island.
For much of the last two years, the Trump administration’s fight against China has been embodied in its sustained economic and legal campaign against Huawei, China’s only truly global company, a $120 billion-a-year telecommunications manufacturer, headquartered in Shenzhen, just over the bridge from newly chilled Hong Kong.
Now the company, which just a few years ago had trouble getting its customers to pronounce its name correctly, has been transformed into a household name in the United States by virtue of a battering combination of US sanctions, criminal charges, trade restrictions, geopolitical threats, and special designations from the government aimed at ostracizing the company and its next generation 5G equipment from western telecom networks.
The company said this spring that the concerted US campaign wiped away an estimated $12 billion in revenue last year—an amount larger than the entire annual revenue of companies like eBay, Adobe, or Nvidia.
Wray’s remarks on China came just hours after what appeared to be a potential turning point in the US fight against Huawei: After months of controversy and study following the UK’s decision to allow Huawei to participate in building parts of its 5G network, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested last week that his government was reconsidering. (As this article was published the British government announced that it had indeed decided to ban purchase of new 5G equipment from Huawei.)
The British move marked a stunning reversal—one that simultaneously advances US goals while also underscoring the toll the US campaign is taking on the basic viability of the Chinese telecom giant. The UK move met with quick support on Capitol Hill, where Republican Senator Ben Sasse called Huawei “the Chinese Communist Party’s tech puppet” and independent Senator Angus King has said, “Huawei can either be a global telecommunications provider or an agent of the Chinese state—they can’t be both.”
Put simply: The US government does not trust Huawei with Western internet, phone lines, and phones, not to mention the data that flows through them.
But those were not the issues the British reportedly cited for considering a pullback from its deal with Huawei. Instead, according to the Telegraph and Bloomberg, officials specifically said they fear that US pressure on Huawei would have “severe” consequences on the company, including blocking Huawei from using technology built using American IP. That, UK officials worry, would in turn force Huawei to use untrusted technology that could make security risks to Britain’s 5G network impossible to control.
The UK decision is all the more surprising because as the year began it indicated that Huawei would be allowed into parts of its 5G network, and globally the Trump administration’s steps against Huawei—moves that came after years of discomfort and growing agitation by US officials over the global spread of the Chinese telecommunications manufacturer—appeared to be losing steam, falling flat among even friendly allies in Europe, like the UK, and failing to convince them to eschew Huawei’s cheaper technologies for supposedly more trustworthy Western companies like Nokia and Ericsson.
The US argues that Huawei, as a Chinese-based company, does not deserve a position of trust in Western networks both because of general fears about the pressure the Chinese Communist Party can bring against its domestic companies and because Huawei over the last decade has acted as a company unworthy of trust.
“Huawei is a serial intellectual property thief, with a pattern and practice of disregarding both the rule of law and the rights of its victims,” Wray said in his remarks at the Hudson Institute. “In our modern world, there is perhaps no more ominous prospect than a hostile foreign government’s ability to compromise our country’s infrastructure and devices. If Chinese companies like Huawei are given unfettered access to our telecommunications infrastructure, they could collect any of your information that traverses their devices or networks. Worse still: They’d have no choice but to hand it over to the Chinese government if asked—the privacy and due process protections that are sacrosanct in the United States are simply nonexistent in China.”
The four-act administration speeches on China and the Chinese Communist Party—all of which seem like they will feature Huawei as a core part of the argument to curb China’s global ambition—cap off a remarkable six months of concerted effort against Huawei that has brought the Trump administration’s efforts back from what appeared to be an embarrassing defeat.
Huawei has become a microcosm of America’s alarm about China’s rise—the sum of all its fears about China’s geopolitical ambitions and technological capabilities. The US government sees Huawei as furthering three uniquely sensitive, destabilizing aspects of China’s growing role in the world: Unfair competition as China’s leap-frog economic growth is enabled by rampant economic espionage and intellectual property theft; China’s ambitions to focus advanced technologies on building an unprecedented surveillance network to crush internal dissent, as it is doing in Hong Kong and against minority groups like the Uighurs; and the aid and assistance China is providing to America’s other adversaries on the global stage, from Russia and Iran to North Korea.
Huawei has broadly, vigorously, and consistently denied US charges that it’s a law-breaking tool of the Chinese state, and its founder has said it will not spy on behalf of any country. Instead, in dozens of my conversations with Huawei executives in the US and China over the last year, they’ve stressed that they see themselves as a pawn caught between two superpowers. Dennis Amari, Huawei’s vice president of US government relations, told me this spring that he feels that the US actions are a “reaction and response to some broader issues around the activities of the Chinese government and military and some of the policies that have been enacted in China—in particular with respect to the Uighurs.”
“There’s clearly been a very strong anti-China philosophy within the administration and in particular in the White House,” Amari told me. “There have been members of President Trump’s team who have prevailed over the more moderate thinkers.”
US officials say that there’s good reason to worry about China’s surveillance ambitions; they point to what they see as a troubling and consistent pattern by China of new laws that could, regardless of Huawei’s philosophical beliefs, compel the company and any other Chinese domestic tech companies to cooperate with Chinese intelligence. The new 66-part national security law in Hong Kong is the third major expansion of legal structures—following a 2015 national security law and a 2017 intelligence law—that compel cooperation from tech companies like Huawei.
Indeed, perhaps as much as US efforts like Wray’s speech have advanced the Huawei fight, it has been China’s own troubling behavior—including fresh signs of the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive support for Huawei, its recent crackdown on dissent, and violations of Hong Kong’s special status—that have strengthened the US case for wariness and breathed new life into the Western push against the company.
The first sign this winter that the US would not be cowed despite a disappointing initial string of setbacks overseas came as a new, superseding indictment raised the stakes in the case against Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested in late 2018 while traveling in Canada at the req