China After Huawei And Hong Kong

New Delhi will have to make some tough decisions over the next few months on the role Huawei will play in India’s 5G rollout. That could set the template for the India-China relationship into the next decade...

- Minhaz Merchant

The fraught trade negotiations between China and the United States have run aground. The elephant in the room is Huawei, China’s telecom network giant. Washington has long suspected Huawei of cyber-spying.

Tensions seemed to have thawed during the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Trump promised to lift part of the ban on US firms dealing with Huawei. Apple, Google, Facebook, and other US tech companies have suspended their engagement with Huawei until the White House clarifies its stand.

The rupture between Beijing and Washington, following Trump’s designation of China as a currency manipulator, goes deeper than Huawei. It encompasses Taiwan, Hong Kong and “open navigation” in the South China Sea. How could this rift between the world’s two biggest economies work to India’s benefit?

In a theory advanced by Ravi Venkatesan, the former chairman of Microsoft, China’s “Sputnik moment” could prove to be India’s big break. Writing in Mint, Venkatesan elaborated: “The Trump administration’s decision to blacklist Huawei and cut off access to Western software and chip technologies has been called China’s Sputnik moment. It will now galvanize China to develop its own independent technology infrastructure. Commentator Fareed Zakaria has suggested that this may be the US’s Sputnik moment too, finally spurring it to wean itself off Chinese suppliers and outcompete China.”