US government should consider China’s approach to national tech champions, says Senator Mark Warner

The US government may need to adopt Beijing’s policy of supporting corporate champions, and work with allies, in order to create alternatives to Chinese 5G wireless technology, a ranking senator said on Monday.

Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat representing Virginia and vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that the US should consider taking a “dramatic, different approach”, including an interventionist industrial policy, to create American companies able to compete with Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecom equipment producer portrayed by the Trump administration as a national security threat.

“We in this country have avoided the notion of industrial policy where the government tries to pick winners and losers. But when we compete with a nation with the size and scope and the focus of China, [current policies] may need to be rethought,” Warner said at the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace, a bipartisan, government-funded think tank.

Warner is also a member of the Senate Finance Committee and a ranking member of the Senate’s National Security and International Trade and Finance Subcommittee.

Huawei’s competitors – Finland’s Nokia, Sweden’s Ericsson and South Korea’s Samsung, in particular – are all great companies, but none of them can count on the kind of financing that China’s government provides the Shenzhen-based firm, according to Warner.

“Should we with our ‘five-eye’ partners … think about how we can combine to have not necessarily an American company but a Western open-democracy type of equivalent that is able to have quality equipment as well as the financing ability to compete?” said Warner, referring to the intelligence-sharing alliance comprising Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.