Can Huawei Go Its Own Way?

As China's leaders bask in the glow of the massive military parade and other festivities they held in Beijing on Tuesday to mark the People's Republic's 70th birthday, a quieter but potentially more significant test of China's global clout is playing out in the bustling tech hub of Shenzhen nearly 1,400 miles to the south.

Huawei, China's most important global tech company, has announced it is going to produce 5G equipment without any US components at all.

Recall that back in May, the Trump administration kneecapped the Chinese tech giant by restricting US companies from selling it software, microchips, and other vital components, because of concerns that Beijing could use Huawei equipment to spy on the US or its allies. It was part of a broader campaign to push back against China's rise as a technology powerhouse. The US has since added a Chinese supercomputer maker to its blacklist and is currently drawing up even tighter restrictions on US tech exports to China.

China's president, Xi Jinping, has responded to this US pressure by promising to break China's technology dependence on the US, evoking the spirit of the Chinese communists' heroic "Long March" of the 1930s. As part of that Huawei is now basically saying: "no US technology? No problem."

The stakes are huge. Huawei makes more smartphones than Apple, and outside of the US, where it's long been de-facto (and now officially) banned, it is the world's biggest supplier of the networking equipment that lets you scroll through social media, hail a car, and stream cat videos on your phone. The company is also leading the push to build ultra-fast, next-generation 5G networks that will power our sci-fi future: smart cities, remote surgery, driverless cars, and driverless cat videos.

If Huawei can't find a way around the US blockade (and there are good reasons to think it will have a hard time – not least due to the US's massive advantages in critical technologies like semiconductors), its days as a global company are numbered, and Xi's drive for tech independence will suffer a major blow.

If it can, then the competition between the US and China for supremacy in the technologies that will help drive the global economy, shape alliances, and determine the balance of military power in the 21st century will have entered a critical new phase.

More from GZERO Media

Listen: In 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at a summit and described their “friendship without limits.” But how close is that friendship, really? Should the US be worried about their growing military and economic cooperation? On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Pulitzer prize-winning national security correspondent for The New York Times David Sanger to talk about China, Russia, the US, and the 21st century struggle for global dominance.

Members of the armed wing of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress line up waiting to vote in a military base north of Pretoria, on April 26, 1994.
REUTERS/Corinne Dufka

On April 27, 1994, Black South Africans went to the polls, marking an end to years of white minority rule and the institutionalized racial segregation known as apartheid. But the “rainbow nation” still faces many challenges, with racial equality and economic development remaining out of reach.

"Patriots" on Broadway: The story of Putin's rise to power | GZERO Reports

Putin was my mistake. Getting rid of him is my responsibility.” It’s clear by the time the character Boris Berezovsky utters that chilling line in the new Broadway play “Patriots” that any attempt to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise would be futile, perhaps even fatal. The show opened for a limited run in New York on April 22.

TITLE PLACEHOLDER | GZERO US Politics

Campus protests are a major story this week over the Israeli operation in Gaza and the Biden administration's support for it. These are leading to accusations of anti-Semitism on college campuses, and things like canceling college graduation ceremonies at several schools. Will this be an issue of the November elections?

The view Thursday night from inside the Columbia University campus gate at 116th Street and Amsterdam in New York City.
Alex Kliment

An agreement late Thursday night to continue talking, disagreeing, and protesting – without divesting or policing – came in stark contrast to the images of hundreds of students and professors being arrested on several other US college campuses on Thursday.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Judge Amy Coney Barrett after she was sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S. October 26, 2020.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Some of the conservative justices (three of whom were appointed by Trump) expressed concern that allowing former presidents to be criminally prosecuted could present a burden to future commanders-in-chief.

A Palestinian woman inspects a house that was destroyed after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, April 24, 2024.
Abed Rahim Khatib/Reuters

“We are afraid of what will happen in Rafah. The level of alert is very high,” Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, said Thursday.

Haiti's new interim Prime Minister Michel Patrick Boisvert holds a glass with a drink after a transitional council took power with the aim of returning stability to the country, where gang violence has caused chaos and misery, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti April 25, 2024.
REUTERS/Pedro Valtierra

Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry formally resigned on Thursday as a new transitional body charged with forming the country’s next government was sworn in.