Back in the fall of 2007, I went on the U.S. House floor and locked horns with Communist China’s Huawei technology company and its American supporters in the private and public sectors. My conviction then was that the company constituted a threat to the security of the United States. I argued that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States should block Huawei’s purchase of a significant minority stake in the 3Com Corporation. As I noted in a November 2007 Human Events article:
The psychological disorder termed “cognitive dissonance” occurs when individuals refuse to acknowledge facts that contradict their existing views. In the realm of national security, the equivalent of cognitive dissonance is properly termed “communist dissonance.” This occurs when the global sophisticates inhabiting America’s business and political elites refuse to recognize facts contradicting their belief communist China is our friend.
Ultimately, that deal did not go through. Still, at that time, America’s appeasers of Communist China were legion for all the wrong reasons—avarice, arrogance, and power. Opposition to such appeasement was branded naïve, at best, or antiquated Cold War jingoism, at worst.
Yet, through it all, the clarion moral vision of people who understood Communism is an oppressive, insidious system, such as Gordon Chang, the late Harry Wu, and other intrepid souls has persisted and, God willing, prevailed at least in the present instance of Huawei.
Now more than a decade later, there comes this tweet from Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:
America and its allies must make sure Huawei is kept far away from their cell phone towers, writes @EliLake. This is not only about Iran sanctions busting. https://t.co/DHM48dswgG
— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) December 7, 2018
The Eli Lake article is headlined, “Why Huawei Should Worry America: Be more concerned about the company’s possible involvement in espionage than its alleged violations of sanctions against Iran.”
Lake recaps “the arrest in Canada of Wanzhou Meng, Huawei’s chief financial officer . . . on what appears to be Huawei’s evasion of U.S. sanctions against Iran.” Then Lake quickly cuts to the chase: “These are serious allegations, but U.S. intelligence agencies have an even greater concern: that China’s largest telecom company will allow the Chinese state to monitor the electronic communications of anyone using Huawei technology.”
Lake recounts how earlier this year U.S. spy agencies urged Americans not to use Huawei phones; how Australia banned Huawei from assisting the development of its 5G wireless network; and, how in October, Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) warned Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, that joint intelligence activities with the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand may be curtailed if Canada allows Huawei to aid in the construction or maintenance of his nation’s 5G wireless network.
Further, he informs readers how, in 2012, the House Intelligence Committee released a “comprehensive report on Huawei and ZTE” that determined: “Inserting malicious hardware or software implants into Chinese-manufactured telecommunications components and systems headed for U.S. customers could allow Beijing to shut down or degrade critical national security systems in a time of crisis or war.”
This report’s perspicacity, Lake notes, was ironically attested to by communist China’s 2017 “National Intelligence Law and a related cybersecurity law,” which compels Chinese companies like Huawei to abet the communist dictatorship in its espionage activities—including “offensive intelligence operations,” such as “handing over access to ‘key business and personal data (which must be stored in China), proprietary codes, and other intellectual property” (per a Lawfare analysis).
In referring to this 2012 report, Lake believes that “in some ways these concerns about Huawei are old news.”
Yep, as Yogi Berra said, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.” But what is new is the growing number of voices in American government who are finally recognizing what so many sovereign American citizens have long known: China is a nuclear-armed Communist dictatorship that views itself as a rival model of government to liberal democracies; and covets a method for subjugating and oppressing the rest of the world as it has its own people.
Thus, over a decade and many positive developments later after I first tussled with Huawei, my wishes for China’s Communist butchers, who murdered my generation of Chinese freedom seekers in Tiananmen Square, and for their dwindling numbers of American appeasers, which remain unchanged and unprintable, are increasingly, if belatedly, being echoed in all the right places.
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