China won’t sit and watch, warns Huawei chairman Eric Xu

“The Chinese government would not sit there and watch Huawei being slaughtered. I believe there would be counter-measures”, Eric Xu, rotating chairman at Huawei, told CNBC. The rhetoric highlights the tensions between the top two global powers engaged in a technological war.

Founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, Huawei Technologies Co, manufactures consumer electronics goods, smartphones, and telecommunications equipment. It is the supply of telecommunications equipment that has brought Huawei into the middle of a global fight that threatens to be a thorn in the US and China relationship for a very long time.

Internet connectivity is the crucial backbone of developed economies. We cannot function without the internet and the internet cannot function without the hardware and software required to run it. So naturally, countries want to retain their control over the networks and remain fearful of foreign players taking control of them.

“Huawei is a threat to US national security, but that misses the bigger point. Vulnerabilities in the supply chain of network hardware and software is, has been, and will continue to be a threat to the national security of the United States and many other countries, including China. It remains very difficult to audit that a chip with millions of embedded transistors or…