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the New America think tank who regularly briefs
Congress on China policy. “This is not just crippling
on Huawei as a firm, but crippling on the entire con-
cept of global tech supply chains,” says Sacks.
Huawei got a temporary reprieve on May 20,
when the Commerce Department announced a
90-day exemption. But the firm long ago began
working on cutting out its reliance on U.S. mate-
rials, producing its own semiconductor chips and
working on an alternative operating system to An-
droid. Hu Xijin, editor in chief of China’s state-run
Global Times, tweeted May 21 that the blacklisting
was “a real turning point” for “U.S. semiconductor
companies gradually losing [the] Chinese market.”
This tech cold war matters because it could slow
down or dramatically alter the rollout of a technol-
ogy that is likely to define the future of the Inter-
net for the next decade—the 5G networks in which
Huawei has all but cornered the market. The race to
roll out 5G is the most consequential fight for global
technological supremacy since the U.S. battled the
Soviet Union to put a man on the moon. The winner
will take home billions, if not trillions, in profits and
gain a powerful seat at the table in creating the in-
frastructure for the next billion Internet users. And
right now, it looks like the U.S. is losing.
he fifth generation of network
T technology arrived in the U.S. on
April 3 in Chicago and Minneapolis.
It would have been a banner day for American
34 Time June 3–10, 2019
^
Huawei technology IT infrastructure, were it not for the fact that citi-
on a Nemont cell zens of Hangzhou, Shanghai and Wuhan had all
tower outside been enjoying experimental 5G networks for
Scobey, Mont. months. In Fangshan, autonomous vehicles are al-
ready using 5G to transmit data to one another to
avoid collisions.
China’s edge in 5G is disorienting for the U.S.,
which is used to dominating new technology and
the economic growth that accompanies it. If the U.S.
lags in 5G, does it lose the opportunity to birth the
next Amazon, the next Netflix, the next Uber? Up
until now, the status quo has been that American
tech companies innovate while Chinese companies
duplicate, but that has much to do with infrastruc-
tural advantages in the U.S., along with world-class
universities and easy access to capital. What does it
Huawei founder mean if the U.S. doesn’t have that advantage? What
and CEO
Ren Zhengfei if the next Apple or Microsoft—trillion-dollar giants
▽ that alter the global landscape with every decision
they make—comes out of China?
5G means a lot more than just another bar on your
cell phone. The hop from 3G to 4G meant we went
from being able to read an article on our phones to
being able to stream a movie. But the leap from 4G
to 5G will mean an exponential rise in download
and upload speeds across every Internet- connected
device you own, the ability to connect those de-
vices to a single network easily and the ability
to off-load computing to the cloud. It’s not only
the most significant shift in computing since the
smartphone, it will also enable huge advances in