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China’s tech companies have had a rough 2019 but will the US be the long-term loser amid ongoing stand-off?
- Putting companies like Huawei on the trade blacklist has exposed China’s soft underbelly – its reliance on foreign technology as part of a global supply chain
- Beijing now wants to create a road to self-sufficiency, even if this means a certain amount of ‘reinventing the wheel’
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For many of China’s technology companies, 2019 has been a rough year.
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Following the arrest of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou late last year over allegations of bank fraud and her ongoing US extradition proceedings in Canada, Huawei in May was put on a US trade blacklist that bans them from doing business with US companies.
Months later, some of China’s largest artificial intelligence firms such as SenseTime, Megvii and Hikvision were also added to the same blacklist amid concern in Washington that their surveillance technology was being used by China to commit human rights abuses against the Uygur ethnic minority in Xinjiang.
To top it all, TikTok – the wildly popular short video app operated by China’s ByteDance that has taken the world by storm – has recently come under US scrutiny over national security, privacy and censorship concerns.
All of this has happened against the backdrop of the US-China trade war, and increasing suspicion in the US over China’s ambitions to become a global leader in strategic technologies, such as AI and 5G.
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“There’s a deep distrust [of China],” said James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organisation in Washington, DC. “People worry that China is spying on them, and many people in Washington DC are convinced that China steals Western intellectual property.”
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