#vi Beyond Citations | Origins of supply chain security
Neither Israel nor the US - it started with China's 5G star Huawei
Curated by Lokendra Sharma, Beyond Citations grounds vital tech developments in foundational scholarship. Because academic work is deeply relevant beyond citations in the scholarly universe.
Ever since Israel’s pager attack and the US proposing to ban connected car technologies emanating from China, supply chain security has become a buzzword. This edition of Beyond Citations takes a step back, and examines when and how supply chain security concerns first emerged.
September 2024 was a momentous month for international security. On 17-18 September, Israel conducted a sophisticated supply chain attack against Hezbollah leading to the explosion of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies across Lebanon. On 23 September, the Biden administration proposed banning connected car technologies having anything to do with China. But the shift to supply chain security did not take place in September 2024 even as developments in that single month furthered that shift.
Concerns around securing supply chains began in a major way in the telecom sector in the late 2010s, when states including the US and India started fearing about Chinese dominance in the telecom — especially, 5G — with globally competitive players such as Huawei supplying relatively cheap equipment to telecom services providers wanting to make a shift from 4G to 5G. Soon enough, the US, Australia, Japan and India effectively banned the participation of Chinese telecom equipment providers such as Huawei in their respective 5G rollouts. India never officially banned Huawei or ZTE, but simply left them out from a list of trusted suppliers telecom players could source from.
From the US to India, the concern with Chinese telecom equipment has been the potential presence of backdoors. Aware, and determined to tackle this perception, Huawei even reportedly offered to sign an agreement with India that there was no backdoor but this was not sufficient to convince the Indian government.
While the Quad partners of the US were relatively quick in targeting Huawei (Australia in fact banned Huawei even before the US), another key ally of the US — the UK — was ambivalent. Going against the tide, the UK initially permitted Huawei to play a limited role. In January 2020, the UK government decided to keep Huawei out of the core of the 5G network, but allow Huawei involvement up to 35 per cent of the network in the periphery. But barely a few months later, the UK government finally reversed course, and opted for a complete ban. The July 2020 decision by the UK entailed continuing with keeping Huawei out of the core 5G network, but also prohibited buying new Huawei 5G equipment after 31 December 2020 and required for the removal of all Huawei equipment from 5G network by end of 2027.
But why did the UK first resisted the pressure from the US but ultimately decided to join the tide? Francisca Da Gama and Kim Bui in their following 2024 paper provide some answers.
Da Gama, F., & Bui, K. (2024). ‘Nesting Dragon, Soldier, Spy’: Shaping the Narrative on China Through Huawei in UK Parliamentary Debates. Journal of Contemporary China, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2024.2399048 (open access)
Da Gama and Bui closely examine the UK parliamentary debates from September 2012 to July 2020. More specifically, they look at 24 debates in the House of Commons that included a discussion on Huawei. By deploying qualitative thematic analysis that involved coding of ‘Huawei’ utterances in the parliament, the authors identified four themes in the selected debates: ‘Huawei as technological innovator and collaborator, Huawei as national security threat, undermining UK relationships with allies, and embodying opposing values to the West.’
The authors find that innovation and collaboration theme dominated the parliamentary debates in 2012-13; national security concerns became dominant from 2019 onwards; pressure from allies (Trump 1.0 in particular) pushed the UK to ban Huawei; the notion of China’s Huawei being incompatible with Western values became prevalent closer to the ban. The authors also find that ‘Huawei was subjected to a political sinologism bound with negative views of China’ wherein ‘[s]inologism draws attention to how knowledge about China is constructed through a Western lens to reinforce Western dominance and elide alternative views’.
What Da Gama and Bui’s paper demonstrates is that there were considerations and factors other than supply chain security that motivated the UK to reverse course and completely ban Huawei in July 2020. Did non-security factors motivate (at least partially) other states as well that banned Huawei?