China and the United States have become locked in a competitive struggle over who will control two technologies widely expected to transform the global economy: artificial intelligence and the next generation of wireless service, or 5G. That years-long slow-boil began to heat up in recent weeks. And naturally, it involved a tweet.
Most recently, Chinese telecom equipment and consumer electronics giant Huawei filed suit against the U.S. government on Thursday, alleging that a law passed last August banning the company’s hardware is unconstitutional because it unfairly targets Huawei.
The arms race between the two superpowers over the tech talent, physical infrastructure and industrial muscle—not to mention the IP that comes with the technologies—that will unlock these advancements has been increasingly evident in diplomatic machinations, public investments of varying size and outward rhetoric from state leaders, as each country’s government has moved the technologies to the top of their respective economic agendas.
These struggles are about more than economic opportunity alone. The shift to 5G networks, which promise to eventually reach speeds up to 100 times faster than what’s currently available, could expand the role of wireless communications systems into everything from power grids to traffic, while AI is already facilitating the mass collection and processing of data that will power critical tools like autonomous driving and facial recognition.
In that future state, control over telecom equipment and AI-powered data centers could be like holding the keys to a society. Cooperation between the U.S. National Security Agency and major cell carriers in monitoring citizen communications and the Chinese government’s widespread use of identification scanning in law enforcement have already shown the surveillance power inherent to both technologies.
President Donald Trump’s administration’s increasing focus on beating China to 5G was on display in a plan floated by his reelection campaign last week to nationalize the construction of the new cellular networks. The half-baked proposal would involve the U.S. government taking over parts of the wireless wave spectrum and sharing them with carriers on a wholesale basis.
While administration officials pushed back against the report, it’s not the first time the issue has been raised; Axios previously reported that some members of the administration had considered a federal takeover of the process for national security reasons early last year.
Meanwhile, the government has picked a high-profile fight with Chinese telecom equipment and consumer electronics giant Huawei, urging ally countries to ban the company from building 5G infrastructure for fear that the Chinese government might use it as a backdoor for surveillance purposes. That mostly behind-the-scenes maneuvering dramatically escalated when Canadian authorities arrested Huawei chief financial officer and daughter of the company’s founder Meng Wanzhou at the request of the U.S. government allegedly for breaking U.S. sanctions with Iran.
Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner also recently proposed leveling sanctions against Huawei over its alleged theft of trade secrets and business in countries sanctioned by the U.S. Warner previously introduced the ZTE Enforcement Review and Oversight (ZERO) Act, which sought to impose similar restrictions on Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE.
