Korea, Huawei, And The China Problem

Seventy years ago today North Korean troops and tanks poured across the 38th parallel into South Korea, stunning and nearly overwhelming America and the West as an incipient Cold War suddenly grew dangerously hot. Today we are proud to remember the veterans of the Korean War and those who made the ultimate sacrifice in that conflict—a conflict that is still not formally over (there is no peace treaty between North Korea and South Korea or South Korea’s ally the United States). 

So what does the outbreak of the Korean War have to do 5G technology and Chinese tech giant Huawei? 

Plenty. Because the real threat to America and the West seventy years ago wasn’t North Korea but China. And just as seventy years ago America had to come to the rescue of freedom and security across East Asia, so today America faces an analogous mission in protecting the wireless technology that will shape the rest of this century.

In 1950 it was Chinese dictator Mao Zedong’s declaration of support for Kim Il-Sung’s invasion of his southern neighbor, which prompted Josef Stalin to green light the invasion in the first place.

It was Mao who used the see-saw conflict on the Korean peninsula to set a trap for American forces advancing on the Yalu River, and who nearly triggered a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.

It was Mao who used his intervention in the Korean conflict to wipe away a century of humiliation of China at the hands of the West, and to reassert China’s presence as a great power. In a profound sense, we have been living with the consequences ever since.

Just as historians talk about the “German problem” that sprawls across the history of Europe in the twentieth century, so it is time to talk about “the China problem” that spans world history even longer.

In the century before 1950, it was China’s decline as an empire and power that triggered vast ripple effects across Asia, from the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, to the Russo-Japanese war and French colonization of Indochina—not to mention Japan’s invasion of China and ultimately the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Then, starting with China’s involvement in the Korean War, it’s been China’s rise as a great power that has had an even bigger disruptive effect not only on Asia, but around the world. Mao foresaw China’s rise as one led by armies on the march and (after 1964) nuclear weapons. Today China’s Communist Party leadership sees that advance as one that comes not only through military power but through an economic imperialism that spans the globe from Australia and Africa to the shelves of your local Walmart WMT +2.3%.

Which brings us to Huawei. China’s leadership see the world’s biggest tech equipment company as more than just a commercial enterprise. It is for them another extension of China’s inevitable global hegemony as China aspires to become the world’s biggest and most influential economy. By bringing ninety-plus countries into Huawei’s web of 5G technology contracts and testing agreements, Beijing is realizing a geopolitical as well as economic goal—one reason that Huawei sees the struggle for 5G dominance against the U.S. as nothing less than warfare. 

From that perspective, Huawei and Beijing see America’s slide into recession, violence, and uncertainty in the Covid-19 aftermath, as proof that they are destined to win.

That prediction may be premature. Seventy years ago, American and Korean forces had to retreat to the Pusan perimeter as the Communists overran the peninsula. Then Douglas MacArthur’s surprise landing at Inchon reversed the tide of war. Then combined North Korean and Chinese armies nearly overwhelmed the Allies again, as Marines fought a desperate rearguard action at the Chosin reservoir. Then MacArthur and General Matthew Ridgway turned the tables yet again, and sent Communist forces reeling back to the 38th parallel—where everything had started less than a year before.

Interestingly, it was MacArthur who understood that his last and greatest war was not being fought with North Korea, but with China. In a secret memo for Defense Secretary George Marshall in November 1950 (as revealed in my biography of MacArthur) regarding China’s intentions in Korea, MacArthur wrote that Mao was creating “a new and dominant power in Asia which for its own purposes is allied with the Soviet Union, but which in its own concepts and methods has become aggressively imperialistic with a lust for expansion and increased power.”

He added that if China were to achieve that power, “I dread to think what might happen.”

MacArthur’s prediction has almost come true. We have to regard today’s struggle between China and the West for the future of 5G and advanced technology from AI and supercomputers to driverless cars and quantum, in the shadow of a war that began seventy years ago, and see the conflict for what it really is: a struggle for the future of the world. 

In 1950 we faced a war we were not prepared to fight and nearly lost, only to finally prevail.  We may not have a MacArthur on our side this time. But we have ourselves, and the friends of freedom around the world.

Don’t count us out.