U.S. Presidential Race Takes Spotlight Off China

By Ernest Worthman, Executive Editor, AWT magazine, Senior Member, IEEE

October 27, 2020

Ern’s Perspective

Worthman

One interesting thing that has absent from the news cycles lately is President Donald Trump’s villainization of China, in favor of villainizing the Democrats. As he Twitters along, beating up Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, the media and others, China just continues to disengage with America in certain vectors.

For example, despite this administration’s efforts to deny access to technology, China has managed to evolve a very advanced chipset, it has just released the Kirin 9000 SoC in the new Mate 40 Pro smartphone.

This SoC is as advanced, or even more advanced than the best that Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung have to offer. It is using the latest 5 nm process, which should provide measurable gains across the important parameters – power, particularly, processing, and speed when compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus.

What the Trump administration is doing is not beneficial to the United States. Of course, there are things that need to be addressed with China. But America is not going to bully them into changing their ways. If anything, it will have the opposite effect.

China has plenty of power in this world. And while some of the western countries are looking at taking them out of the wireless ecosystem, particularly the core, China will, simply, find other customers, and sell to countries that are not shaking in their boots from Trump’s saber-rattling.

An example of that is Brazil, where the United States is offering a bribe to have them turn against China. That may or may not work. China is their biggest trading partner. And, while the United States also has significant financial dealing with Brazil, it is putting them in a difficult position that the United States has no business doing. The current political environment here has a lot of countries unsure of dealing with the United States.

Sadly, Sweden has agreed to honor some of the Administration’s demands and oust Huawei. It will be interesting to see how this plays out with Ericsson since they recently made deals with three of China’s major telecom operators.

Will Trump bring the hammer down on Ericsson for doing business with China? If so, that will reduce our supply options by one major player.

Another country, Japan, has resisted U.S. pressure to dump Huawei. They are taking a much more realistic approach by saying they will investigate their hardware and make their own decisions.

With much of the world too busy to worry about anything except the upcoming election, most countries are happy to have a break from the uncontrolled hip-firing coming out of the White house.

However, after the November elections, regardless of who wins, there will be decisions that need to be made. While some pro-western countries are aligning with the United States in dealing with China, many others are not.

The long-term ramifications of choosing sides may be a fragile house of cards and countries that have capitulated to United States pressure may just change their tune. There is no equal to Huawei in the wireless business. Even with the realignment it has to do around resources. It will be some time before the other major players, Nokia, Ericsson, and to a lesser degree, Samsung, and others ramp up to supplying all of the drop-outs from Huawei. And, by then, Huawei will be way ahead in 5G, 6G, or any G. The United States has long lost the “race” for 5G and the current path it is on will only slow us more.

While the United States can certainly develop 5G without being a global player, that will eventually backfire. Regardless of the personal vendetta Trump has against China, the global 5G ecosystem cannot be an agglomeration of separate country proprietary platforms, especially with standards and across frequencies. Continuation down this path will only create an east versus west technology split.

In any event, even if Trump wins a second term and the makeup of Congress changes, that may putting a crimp in his dictatorial mentality of doing what he wants, to whom, without any pushback. Maybe that will curtail his habit of putting personal vendettas ahead of national interests.

There is a lot of uncertainty out there at present and we certainly live in interesting times.