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Huawei could not be charged because all that could be deduced was that Nortel had been hacked by Chinese cyber-intruders. The Chinese authorities did not co-operate, any more than they did in the impeachment trial of U.S. president Bill Clinton when U.S prosecutors wanted to question Chinese nationals over possible connections between the authorization of the sale of defence-sensitive technology to the People’s Republic, and Chinese contributions to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 1996. You can’t convict without witnesses, but if Chinese hackers cyber-looted Nortel and Huawei took off like a rocket at once with similar products, it does not require Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened, or a descent to McCarthyism to accuse the Chinese. One of the assets that was sold out of the Nortel bankruptcy was a large office building on the outskirts of Ottawa that was acquired as a headquarters by the Canadian ministry of national defence. At huge cost, all the communications wiring had to be stripped out because it was a direct cyber conduit for Chinese industrial espionage.

The current relevance of this unhappy episode is that the West generally should be unambiguously supportive of the ongoing U.S. effort to persuade China to conform to civilized international business practices. That effort has no more strenuous supporters than China’s neighbours, including Japan, India, South Korea and Vietnam. No one wishes to antagonize China and no one disputes that the People’s Republic has accomplished the greatest and swiftest emergence ever of any formerly under-developed country. It is also the first historic Great Power to make the full circle from its status as one of the world’s great nations to a ramshackle state of exploitation and vulnerability, and then come back to being one of the world’s most important and respected countries. “China has stood up!” said Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square in 1949. It did so hesitantly through the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward (1950s), and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, both unmitigated disasters, and it had to take the economic roadmap of the West to make it, under Deng Xiaoping and his successors since the 1980s. But it has done what no other country has done. This was not just rebuilding a shattered advanced country that had lost a war, like Germany and Japan; this was taking a country that had declined for centuries, been pillaged by the world’s Great Powers through the “Open Door” and the “unequal treaties,” and had suffered a brutal invasion and partial occupation by Japan and a prolonged civil war, and raising it in one generation to the level of a superpower.