Eric Schmidt: Huawei has engaged in unacceptable practices
Huawei poses challenges to national security and has engaged
in unacceptable acts, Google's former boss Eric Schmidt has told the BBC.
But he says the West should respond by competing with China
and its technologies, rather than disengaging.
Mr Schmidt now chairs the Pentagon's Defence Innovation
Board.
The UK is currently reviewing whether to continue letting
Huawei help build its 5G mobile networks amid growing pressure to exclude the
Chinese firm.
"There's no question that Huawei has engaged in some
practices that are not acceptable in national security," Mr Schmidt told a
BBC Radio 4 documentary.
He said it was possible to think of the company as a means
of "signals intelligence" - a reference to spy agencies like the UK's
GCHQ or NSA in the US.
"There's no question that information from Huawei
routers has ultimately ended up in hands that would appear to be the
state," Mr Schmidt added.
"However that happened, we're sure it happened."
Huawei has consistently denied accusations that it is an arm
of the Chinese state, or passes on customer data to the authorities.
"It is simply not true," Victor Zhang, Huawei's UK
chief told the BBC.
"Huawei is a private company,100% owned by its employees.
Huawei is independent from any government, including the Chinese
government."
Anti-China prejudices
Eric Schmidt says the real issue with Huawei lies in the
challenge to US leadership it represents: a Chinese company operating on a
global stage that is building a better product than its competitors.
"It's extremely important that we have choices,"
he told the BBC.
"The answer to Huawei... is to compete by having a
product and product line that is as good."
Eric Schmidt spent a decade and a half as chief executive
and then executive chairman of Google and its parent company Alphabet.
He acknowledges that over a long career in Silicon Valley,
he had underestimated China's ability to innovate.
"I have carried the prejudices about China in my years
working with them," he said.
"That they're very good at copying things, that they're
very good at organising things, that they throw large numbers of people at it.
But they're not going to do anything new. They're very, very good at stealing,
if you will, our stuff. Those prejudices need to be thrown out.
"The Chinese are just as good, and maybe better, in key
areas of research and innovation as the West.
"They're putting more money into it. They are putting
it in a different way, it is state-directed in a way that is different from the
West. We need to get our act together to compete."
He denies the Chinese model of state-directed investment in
technology is intrinsically more successful than a free-market model. However,
he believes the West needs to make the most of its strengths by:
investing more in research funding
ensuring greater collaboration between private sector, the
state and academia
remaining open to the best talent from around the world
"Most people would prefer to live and work in the West
than work in China," he says.
Catching up
One of the problems in the US and particularly in Silicon
Valley, Mr Schmidt believes, is a historical blindness to the role of the
government in supporting research.
"Everything you see in Silicon Valley to the first
order came from initial federal science grants of one kind or another."
Last year he chaired a US National Security Commission
looking at artificial intelligence.
China's advances in this field are a major concern.
"I would say they are a few years behind," he
says.
"Not five years, and not 10 years. And there's evidence
of China closing the gap in the next few years.
"So the question is: what happens then? Well obviously,
artificial intelligence has military and national security applications."
China's work on quantum computing, he adds, is on a par with
that of the West, and could even be ahead.
Mr Schmidt views the decoupling of the technology sectors in
China and the US as "undesirable", believing it will lead to two
distinct systems.
"Once you diverge these global platforms, you don't get
them back," he says.
"We benefit from having a common platform of
interchange... and I worry that by building these platforms separate, the
countries will understand each other less.
"China's going to dominate whether we couple or
decouple. They have the resources, they have the money, they have the
technology.
"The question is do they operate on global platforms or
do they operate on their own platforms? The more segregated the platforms are,
the more dangerous it is.
"It is in the West's interest that every technology
platform has Western values in them."
Mr Schmidt is cautious about picking national champions and
supporting them. But he says there are weaknesses in the West's own capacity,
particularly in not having foundries that manufacture semiconductor chips. He
says it would be better for China to use chips from Western companies rather
than build its own.
The rise of nationalism and protectionism around the world
is of "great concern", he concludes, pointing to the fact that more
than half of the start-ups in Silicon Valley have been founded by foreign-born
nationals.
Faced with a challenge from China, he draws on his own
Silicon Valley experience.
"The best strategy is to think of it as a competition
not unlike the tech companies, where there's brutal competition," he said.
Comments
Post a Comment