A decade ago, in 2009, the Swedish phone giant Teliasonera set out to build one of the world’s first fourth-generation wireless networks in some of Scandinavia’s most important—and technologically savviest—cities. For Oslo, Norway, Teliasonera made an audacious and unexpected choice of who would build it: Huawei, a Chinese company with little presence outside China and some other developing markets.
For the past seven decades, the world has been moulded by a strong, transatlantic relationship with the US and EU underwriting the terms of peace, stability and economic prosperity. The success of this order has created its own existential challenge. Its rising beneficiaries in Asia and elsewhere increasingly challenge the validity of these arrangements and the efficacy of rules that have managed global affairs
In the absence of government action to address today’s most pressing global problems, multinational corporations are stepping up to offer their own solutions. As in the seventeenth century, when European joint-stock companies built private empires, the future of sovereignty is at stake.
Let’s face it: Huawei’s sinking reputation isn’t merely a victim of geopolitics. Way back in 2003, Huawei admitted copying some router software code from Cisco Systems Inc., which had sued the Chinese firm. Huawei had to remove the pilfered property. In 2010, Motorola Solutions Inc. sued Huawei for stealing its trade secrets, a case that was later settled. Now, part of the latest indictment accuses Huawei of snatching robotics technology from T-Mobile USA Inc..
On September 28, 2018, tech died. That’s according to a widely circulated eulogy prepared by Vincent Deluard, a strategist at INTL FCStone, a financial services company. “If technology is everywhere, the tech sector no longer exists,” he wrote. “If the tech sector no longer exists, its premium is no longer justified.”
Europe’s non-geopolitical view appears to be changing as many European countries individually and the European Union collectively start to see China as a potential competitor. In addition, China’s Made in 2025 strategy served as an important wake up call to high-tech European industry.
The arrest of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was apparently a long time coming. U.S. investigators began looking into Huawei’s dealings when Iran’s once Chinese-backed ZTE was identified as a sanctions-breaker. U.S. prosecutors now appear to have substantial evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s state-backed mobile and technology company’s violations of the sanctions regime against Iran.
Indeed, the rise of Asia as a whole is recasting the physical and mental map of the world. Proliferating transnational relationships and new flows of finance, trade, technology, information, energy and labour have created three new strategic geographies which are already escaping the shadow of transatlantic arrangements. They essentially represent the collision of erstwhile political constructs – and their management requires new ideas, nimble institutions and fluid partnerships.
During the past three decades, there has been a momentous change in the global economy. One of the most troubling and puzzling features — the failure of poor countries to catch up to developed countries — has seemingly been overturned.
One of the digital planet’s many pleasures is that it has many distinct mountaintops. Different locations have offered different advantages: The US, Europe, China and India. But that era might be coming to an end. We may be en route to digital unipolarity as all the others cede the high ground to China.
