The cold war of this century is technological: how it affects us

MADRID.- The

United States

and

China

they are leading a battle that will condition the evolution of the global economy. In late January, the United States Department of Justice brought criminal charges against tech giant Huawei for stealing trade secrets, obstructing justice, deceiving the bank, and ignoring US sanctions on l & # 39; Iran. These are charges that can lead to extradition to the United States. Huawei vice president, Meng Wangzhou, in Canada since December. This is the last chapter of an increasingly open confrontation between the two countries related to technology.

What began as a trade war, with the imposition of tariffs on a growing number of products, has evolved and has led to the United States. Chinese companies such as ZTE, Tencent or Huawei.

The new cold war is technological. "Now all this is happening in front of the public," says Zvika Krieger, director of the World Economic Forum (WEF) center and technology expert. "Until now, only the experts in the sector or the authorities involved in these issues were aware of this technological war, but the confrontation is now open," he said.

A few days ago, the technological war became the elephant in the Davos Summit Hall. Everyone was talking about the issue that was not in the official program. "The problem appeared in 90% of the meetings I attended," said Carlos Pascual, former US ambbadador and vice president of the IHS risk consulting firm Markit. "If the trade war is resolved this month (the ultimatum will expire on March 1) and that China promises to buy a lot more US goods and open up to foreign investment, the war technology will not disappear, "he said.

Huawei, plunged into an unprecedented global public relations campaign for more than 30 years, defends its independence from the Beijing authorities. "We are a 100% employee-owned company and we are subject to an annual audit by KPMG," chairman Liang Hua told the Davos summit during a meeting with reporters. .

It is hard to imagine that Huawei or any other Chinese company could withstand the pressure of a regime like that of Beijing, especially for reasons of national security. The emergence of Chinese technology companies in the global economy is threatening the dominance of American companies in the sector so far.

Huawei already overtakes Apple as the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer, behind the Korean Samsung, the company Palo Alto had to lower its revenue forecast for the first time since 2001, due to the impact of the Chinese slowdown on its sales.

The dimensions of this confrontation go beyond the purely sectoral framework and fit fully into geopolitics.

The model of Silicon Valley, the valley near San Francisco where innovation and technological development were backed by abundant private funding and able to take risks, could succumb to the model of Shenzen, the Chinese city that houses some of these technological giants. under the protection of state protection, forced technology transfer of multinationals who want to do business in the country and a lot of inexpensive and trained workforce.

These are two opposing models, one based on private initiative and the other on the public sector, from an authoritarian regime. To strengthen this model, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang launched the Made in China 2025 plan in 2015. Three years later, President Xi Jinping reformulated the program to make China a technological superpower in the industry. aerospace. robotics, biotechnology and computer science. A program that, as recognized by the US Council on International Relations, represents "an existential threat to the technological leadership" of this country.

Washington, hand in hand with its president Donald Trump, has attacked. "The Americans will not give up the global technological supremacy without fighting and the Huawei case shows that this battle has already begun," said Michael Pillsbury, director of the China Studies Center at the Hudson Institute and adviser to Trump administration, in a recent interview. .

For the Eurasia risk consulting firm, one of the main risks of tension is a winter of innovation, due to a brake on investment and technological development worldwide. The brake could come from the development of 5G mobile networks, a technology that according to Paul Triolo, responsible for geotechnology in Eurasia "will be radically different from all that preceded it, as regards innovation to lead."

If one comes to the theory that holds that every industrial revolution was preceded and badociated with the development of a concrete technology that changes society, in the case of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this technology is 5G . The development of self-driving cars or smart cities, for example, requires a huge amount of data, with almost immediate availability, which only 5G networks can achieve.

"The implementation of 5G is key to the development of the digital economy and the Internet of Things and will determine the evolution of the sector." technology for a generation, "said Zvika Krieger. There, we must frame the campaign undertaken by the US authorities to convince its international partners to prohibit Huawei from developing 5G networks. Members of the Five Eyes Alliance, an intelligence agreement signed by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, pledged to veto the Chinese giant. And they are evaluating the addition of Germany, France and Norway, fearing that China could carry out espionage operations using Huawei equipment.

The British Vodafone has announced that it will postpone the installation of Huawei's core network equipment in all its European operations, with significant impact in the eastern countries. British Telecom said that it would eliminate within two years all the Chinese company equipment used in the core network of the mobile operator. German operator Deutsche Telekom however warned that these decisions could delay the development of 5G in Europe, scheduled for 2020, for at least two years. "As the technological and commercial confrontation intensified under the impetus of US economic and national security fears and China's ambitious industrial, technological and economic development goals, every development-related decision 5G networks has been taken into account, politicized ", explains Paul Triolo in his report
The geopolitics of 5G. More and more voices in the sector are influencing the need to address this issue from a multilateral and supranational point of view. At the Davos forum, Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the need to create a multilateral agency, a sort of technological NATO that addresses both cybersecurity issues, such as data processing, artificial intelligence ethics and biogenetics. "We have been [Europa] The European Union has laid the groundwork for regulating data processing and this should be the European standard for progress in digitization, "he said. data (GDPR, entry into force end 2018) A decision to protect consumer data processing, initially rejected by technology giants, but now they see it as a lifeline to regain consumer confidence.

© El País, SL