A Tecno Mobile building in Ikeja, Nigeria. The company is a subsidiary of Transsion, the top smartphone seller in Africa. Credit: Lightfast Media, Creative Commons
U.S. efforts to persuade allies of the security threat posed by Huawei secured an important victory recently with the United Kingdom’s decision to ban the Chinese telecommunications giant from its 5G network. The UK’s anti-Huawei policy, announced only two weeks after India became the first country to ban the Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, might appear to signal that the tide is turning against China’s global technological ambitions. More quietly, however, Chinese startups continue to find success abroad.
Over the past decade, Beijing has led a concerted push for its investors as well as its most innovative technology startups to penetrate emerging markets and to operate at an increasingly global scale. Developing countries have emerged as destinations of choice for Chinese entrepreneurs looking to take their craft abroad. Today, there are more than 10,000 Chinese firms, most of them privately owned, operating across Africa. Chinese star
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Did Eric Dai expose a Chinese scheme to steal critical military technology? Or did he steal millions of dollars from a Chinese company by exploiting geopolitical tensions? It's not entirely clear, but Dai's saga hits all the high notes of current U.S.-China tensions, including convoluted plots to illicitly acquire U.S. semiconductor technology and extraterritorial schemes to harass, intimidate and coerce the Chinese diaspora. What is clear is that, for Dai, who founded a successful Chinese investment firm but is now seeking asylum in the U.S., it feels like World War III.
The former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia talks about why engagement hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded yet; why strategic empathy is so hard to do; and why the U.S. needs an approach to...