Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

id go so far as to say this is more a one-time 1.9 billion dollar bailout for the telecom industry.

the bitter truth is nobody in the USA made it to market as fast as Huawei with 5G for a number of reasons. AT&T and others rested on their laurels, content with a monopoly market where they defined what 4g speeds were and werent. They became convinced they could extend this monopoly assertion to the rest of the world either through sheer hubris or through blind ignorance. Once the global market called their bluff, they scrambled for protectionism from the US government in the form of unsubstantiated sinophobic rhetoric, and stoked an elderly congress still rife with bubbling anticommunist sentiment. Trump gave them their trade war and it wasnt until Canadian bourgeoise faced chinese prisons that they were forced to acquiesce. Huawei's CFO signed off on largely symbolic US charges, and resumed her life.

Now the only damage control can come from US taxpayers, forced to pay twice for inferior 5G.

It's simpler than that. The Chinese Development Bank offered very generous credit to Huawei in a time where the West was letting some of it's most innovative companies collapse or languish (the 2008 financial crisis). Nortel was the main reason this all happened. They were the ones that were doing all the cutting edge wireless network research and when they collapsed Huawei was the one that executed the best in the wake of said collapse.

Say what you will about Chinese companies but damn some of them execute well.

    Nortel was the main reason this all happened. 
    They were the ones that were doing all the cutting 
    edge wireless network research and when they 
    collapsed Huawei was the one that executed the 
    best in the wake of said collapse.

Err ... not sure if you're aware, but it's common knowledge that Nortel's sensitive IP was hacked by the Chinese.

In fact it went on over almost a full decade, from the late 1990's to 2009 when it was brought widely to light. [1]

    Say what you will about Chinese companies but 
    damn some of them execute well.

Well, I mean, especially the ones benefiting from nation-state level corporate espionage.

Of course empires stealing tech from each other has happened many times historically; we don't have to all act shocked that it can happen.

But neither is it irrelevant that it did, in fact, happen, and specifically in the case that you mention of Nortel and Huawei.

It's definitely not just a simple case of "generous credit", though the wider point about Western governments not supporting their core digital infrastructure companies in strategic ways during those years is certainly correct.

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[1] https://mindmatters.ai/2021/04/why-do-huaweis-inventions-loo... -- well-sourced article referencing much of the earlier reporting on the matter

>Huawei's CFO signed off on largely symbolic US charges, and resumed her life.

She resumed her life in return for selling out Huawei. Huawei was put in such a position as to make their further operations in the US very difficult.

https://twitter.com/freekorea_us/status/1441822007897690115

The replacement program is really a bailout for US telecom operations, now that Huawei can barely support them.

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