[chrischen]

Any company with deep financial dependency on the Chinese market (basically all Chinese companies) will have connections with the Chinese Communist party (aka the ruling government), including all Chinese citizens in the country... They will have "deep connection" with the government because all these people and entities are subject to the local laws and established interests and they don't really have an alternative. It's not like the US or the West is so immigration happy welcoming them in with open arms.

As such if the default stance is not to trust or do business with Chinese-related parties this will exclude the entire country eventually, since they aren't given any realistic alternatives to being completely blacklisted they'll likely retaliate (understandably).

What should they do? Just "cooperate"? No amount of cooperation or action from the Chinese side will get them to be trusted or viewed differently, because the fundamental issue isn't that Huawei is selling backdoored or hacked devices (which they aren't, or otherwise everything would have been ripped out instantly)... it's that they fundamentally do not trust the company, or anything from China.

[AnthonyMouse]

> As such if the default stance is not to trust or do business with Chinese-related parties this will exclude the entire country eventually, since they aren't given any realistic alternatives to being completely blacklisted they'll likely retaliate (understandably).

If a company is making ball bearings or bathroom fixtures, you don't have to worry much about their ties as long as they're not your sole supplier. How do you backdoor a manual mechanical valve?

Whereas for anything that has computer code in it, open source down to the microcode or GTFO. Countries will (and should) want to stick to suppliers in the local and allied countries if a foreign one isn't willing to provide that, and have no objections if a country they're doing that to wants to do the same to them.

[paganel]

> If a company is making ball bearings

I know it was an anecdotal example, but a Western company purchasing Chinese-produced ball bearings will most probably mean that Western company doing business with and empowering the Chinese military-industrial complex, seeing how ball bearings are such an integral part of military armoured materiel.

Which goes to show that splitting economic things up into civilian vs. non-civilian is an exercise in futility at the end of it all, and this goes for the West, too.

[AnthonyMouse]

> a Western company purchasing Chinese-produced ball bearings will most probably mean that Western company doing business with and empowering the Chinese military-industrial complex, seeing how ball bearings are such an integral part of military armoured materiel.

It's not about that. You could say that about doing business with them on anything whatsoever. If you buy their plastic toys they could use the profits to build tanks.

The problem here is that they're giving you a device you're putting in a sensitive place containing opaque binary computer code that could be doing anything, which customers can't feasibly replace with their own or audit because they don't have the source code.

[chrischen]

Open source does nothing if you can't verify the shipped code is actually running that. Plus after the whole Supermicro controversy we'd have to check what appear to be ball bearings for embedded spying circuitry.

[seanmcdirmid]

It is funny, because even foreign experts working in China are expected to join the trade union, although they can’t vote in its elections (not a huge loss). Huawei’s connection to the PLA stands out among Chinese companies, but you are correct that every company in China will have strong ties to the CPC and could have strong involvement by the PLA. They mostly don’t, however, the government isn’t that well organized outside if just governing, and China’s corporate scene is very chaotic. A lot of it is just a hyper competitive market that turns them a certain way.

[mytailorisrich]

Well, Nortel had a former US Navy Admiral as CEO at some point.

Deep links between government and large companies exist in every country whether acknowledged or not.

In Huawei's case, frankly the issue was that it was the first time a company not in the West's control became a major player in a strategic industry. Alleged CCP/PLA links are just part of the narrative built against them but the issue was more general.