Kerry Brown

Asian Angle | UK will talk up Huawei to China, then back the US like always

Mired in Brexit and desperate for friends outside Europe, Britain is keen to court Chinese investment. But as the UK’s decision to send a warship to the South China Sea shows, its warm words are likely to be empty ones

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President Donald Trump participates in a signing ceremony for Space Policy Directive 4 in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on Feb. 19, 2019. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford.

Kerry Brown

Published: 7:01am, 25 Feb 2019Updated: 8:56am, 25 Feb 2019

You could almost hear the cheers in Shenzhen. Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre this week went against the grain of its Western spy agency counterparts by concluding the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, headquartered in Hong Kong’s neighbour to the north, posed no more than a “manageable” risk to the UK.

That seemed a victory of sorts for one of China’s most prominent and global companies, which in recent weeks has seen its Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou being detained in Canada at Washington’s request and watched as its reputation has been muddied by a steady stream of claims from Western intelligence services that its closeness to Beijing threatens the rest of the world.

Meng’s arrest was seen by many in China as being – at least in part – an attempt to influence ongoing trade and political disputes between Beijing and Washington, so the apparent peeling off of one of America’s staunchest allies from the anti-Huawei brigade looks like a win.

But while the talk in London may sound soothing to Chinese ears, how much of it is just that? Isn’t it easier to believe that, in the end, Britain will side – as it always seems to when push comes to shove – with a country it so often describes as its greatest ally?

The recommendation by the centre is, after all, only that – non-binding advice. At the end of the day, it will need to be fed into a decision-making process that will result – if Westminster ever emerges from its daily diet of Brexit drama and chaos – in a policy and then action.

These will need to balance not just straight security issues but also political ones. It is here that the case against being closer to Huawei will get trickier.

In the last decade, since Huawei started to emerge in the outside world, Britain has been one of the most open and benign environments for it to work in. It secured major projects with British Telecom supplying equipment.

Despite early worries about the potential security threat it posed in 2009, these were largely allayed by the establishment of the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre in Cheltenham, the town that hosts the headquarters of the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ. The evaluation centre works in partnership with Huawei and is devoted to assessing the company’s products and services, giving those that passed muster a clear bill of health.