RW Johnson: Huawei, Beijing’s eyes and ears – and gullible African leaders

Key topics.Huawei's ties to Chinese intelligence raise global security concerns.The African Union's HQ was compromised by Huawei-led espionage.ANC and allies ignore China's influence despite clear warning signs..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson___STEADY_PAYWALL___.The last decade has seen a growing storm in a number of Western countries over equipment supplied by the Chinese manufacturer of telecoms equipment, Huawei – which is, indeed, the biggest company in the world in that field. (It is also the third biggest smart phone maker, after Apple and Samsung.) .There are several sources to the unease over Huawei. No matter how much the company (whose name means "China is Great") protests its innocence, the fact is that all Chinese companies are obliged by law to co-operate fully with the Chinese state, including its intelligence services. Secondly, the Chinese Communist Party has agents within all Chinese companies and they have sweeping powers, including a veto on all executive appointments. So if the Chinese authorities want Huawei to use its skills and equipment to spy on customers, Huawei cannot possibly refuse..There is also the fact that Huawei equipment – not just telecoms but surveillance equipment, facial scanners, high definition body cameras, smart glasses which enable police to scan crowds for a watch list of suspects and much else besides – is in use in the bitterly controversial province of Xinjiang where over a million Uighurs are in re-education camps essentially due to their Muslim faith. Torture, abuse and even death is common in these camps and Xinjiang has the unenviable reputation of being the world's largest hi-tech surveillance state, one in which Huawei plays a large role..Huawei has also developed a programme known as Safe City which includes all manner of surveillance equipment (e.g. biometric scanners which pick up the iris patterns in people's eyes, a virtually infallible means of recognition, and a voiceprint data base which can match up recordings of known individuals). Safe City has been marketed to over 80 countries and Huawei has a special $1.5 billion fund to assist African countries to buy this programme. Many of the regimes which have bought Safe City are extremely repressive and Huawei seems eager to spread the 1984 world which its equipment enables..Finally, of course, there have been many individual instances of Huawei equipment being used for surveillance and espionage purposes in various Western countries, particularly the US. However a particular shock was felt in April 2018 when Le Monde Afrique revealed the systematic espionage conducted at the African Union's headquarters in Addis Ababa. China had won many hearts at the AU by donating a special futuristic compound, containing a conference centre and an office complex, for use as the AU's headquarters. This was, of course, stuffed with Huawei computers, telecoms and other equipment. .All went well until – after five years – someone discovered that between the hours of midnight and 2 a.m. all the Huawei servers began to chatter away sending vast amounts of data to China. They had been pre-programmed to do do this. It was clear that even the most confidential data about Africa's 54 countries was not safe. It emerged that this had been going on ever since the new compound had been finished in 2012. Moreover, further investigation revealed that microphones and other listening devices had also been secretly installed throughout the complex. .Read more: 🔒 Apple's China dilemma: Geopolitical strains and Huawei's surge threaten tech giant's dominance.What was so striking about this case was its boldness. It was perfectly obvious that the entire Chinese "gift" to the AU has been part of a large espionage operation from the start. The facts were simply not deniable. Indeed, it was only too easy to imagine the thought processes behind this "gift"; that Africans were extremely gullible, that taking sensitive information from them would be like "taking candy off a baby", that they were so poor that they would be pathetically grateful for any gift, and that if anything went wrong they could easily be bribed to keep quiet. .This may not have been far off the mark. The Chinese ambassador to the AU, Kuang Weilin, called the report "absurd and preposterous" while the Chinese foreign ministry called the allegations in the report "baseless" and "complete nonsense". More remarkable still, the head of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki, called the report "all lies" and said nothing would distract the organisation from building stronger ties with China, though this was to some extent undermined by the statement of the AU Chairman, the Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who publicly regretted that the AU had not financed its own headquarters. .But in general the AU seemed keen not to talk about the affair and the next year signed large further contracts with Huawei. Yet in 2020 Japan's Computer Emergency Response Team reported that a Chinese hacking outfit called "Bronze President" had hacked into and extracted data from security cameras at the AU headquarters. But if the hope had been to prevent the affair becoming a scandal throughout Africa, it had indeed been a success. Indeed, it was a classic case of news suppression. There was no mention of the affair in most African media. In South Africa neither the SABC nor any of the press mentioned the affair at all. It was clearly inconvenient information which a lot of people would rather not know..Ironically, the affair had much greater publicity and impact in Europe. Despite repeated American warnings, Britain had installed a great deal of Huawei telecoms equipment – which was, of course, cheaper than its competitors. In order to ensure security a special Cyber Security Centre known as "The Cell", was set up in Banbury, near Oxford, allowing GCHQ to supervise and monitor all the Huawei equipment. .But when news of the Chinese operation in Addis Ababa became public the US made it clear to its Western allies that in future the US would not be able to share intelligence information with countries that used Huawei or (its Chinese competitor) ZTE telecoms equipment in their 5G networks. This has already had sweeping effects. Britain, determined to maintain its Five Eyes intelligence network with the US, has stripped out all its Huawei equipment, as have Sweden and Japan. Around half of the EU members have already followed suit or plan to. However, a number of non-Chinese telecom companies have complained that they have been hacked by Chinese cyber spies who have planted bugs in their systems which are proving very difficult to get rid of..This leaves the question of African telecommunications up in the air. Most African countries continue to use Chinese equipment because it's cheaper and, effectively, they simply ignore the question of security. One has to assume that the result is that China has a free run in gathering intelligence or even commercial information in Africa. After all, if the reaction of the AU, having been publicly revealed as completely penetrated by Chinese intelligence, is simply to deny the matter completely, it's difficult to imagine that individual African countries are likely to fight lonely battles to resist Chinese espionage..Read more: Eskom tariff hike defeat, debt plan rubbished; Angola targets Dos Santos assets; Facebook, Huawei.On top of that, of course, South Africa and other BRICS members are keen to believe that Chinese leadership of the Global South is wholly benign, though a mere glance at the rapacity of Chinese neo-colonialism in Zimbabwe really ought to serve as a sufficient warning. .This refusal to face facts is a disturbing feature of the way the ANC thinks. It would like to believe all sorts of nice things about Russia and China and really doesn't want to hear the truth about how brutal and brutally self-interested these regimes actually are. Similarly, the ANC has congratulated Daniel Chapo on winning the Mozambique election and his counterparts in Zimbabwe, Angola and Venezuela on their respective electoral successes. The elaborate pretence is that all these countries are democracies. Yet all these elections were grotesquely rigged and there was also a great deal of violence and intimidation used against the Opposition. There is also trouble over irregularities in the recent Namibian election where the ANC's brother movement, SWAPO, triumphed again. .That is, our rulers are increasingly living in a make-believe world maintained only by more and more pretence. Last year the ANC congratulated Miguel Diaz-Canel on the triumph of the Cuban Communist Party in the elections to the National Assembly of People's Power (as Havana's parliament is quaintly known). The CCP won all 470 seats because, of course, it was the only party allowed to run. And the ANC was happily confident that the Assad regime in Syria was "progressive" – until it fell and was revealed as a regime of mass torture and murder, something which will now be forgotten as quickly as possible..There is, though, one statistic which the ANC might take note of. As Africa's population swells, more and more Africans want to emigrate – and this is true of South Africa too. When quizzed about where they want to go, these would-be migrants overwhelmingly plump for Western Europe and North America – indeed, there is talk of a growing "Scramble for Europe". Almost nobody at all wants to go to Russia, China, Cuba or any of the ANC's other favourite countries. This clearly represents a vast consensus at Africa's grass roots, a consensus directly opposed to the make-believe world they hear about from ANC platform speakers..Read also:.Buffett buys Berkshire shares; Huawei booms in China; Multichoice competitor foldsZuma in spotlight; $2bn Tuna Bond twist; Hulamin slumps to loss; Huawei lays off US staff🔒 The dark side of Huawei – The Wall Street Journal

RW Johnson: Huawei, Beijing’s eyes and ears – and gullible African leaders

Key topics

Related Stories