The arrest last week in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, China’s iconic company, is a watershed event. The arrest, made at the behest of the US justice department, has roiled markets around the world. It threatens to derail trade talks between the US and China, and to expose American businesses and executives in China to retaliation.

But the sense of humiliation Meng’s arrest has provoked, and the passions it has unleashed in China, will also have long-term political effects.

Public opinion in China, as well as official statements, has already expressed cold anti-American fury. The sentiment that the US is ruthlessly thwarting China is unanimous. Here, as in many contemporary conflagrations, history should be our guide — and a warning.

Let there be no doubt: they’re poking a lion that is wide awake and increasingly angry

It’s worth remembering today that an anti-American boycott — of the kind now being popularly mooted — was China’s first mass political movement of the modern era. Erupting in 1905, it expressed a long-simmering dissatisfaction with China’s Qing rulers for failing to stand up to foreign powers and protect Chinese interests and dignity.

A leading promoter of the boycott was Liang Qichao, China’s foremost modern thinker and an early intellectual mentor to its communist leaders. Liang had already warned his compatriots about their lowly status in the world, and prescribed ways to overcome it.

He had returned from the US in 1903, convinced that America’s new corporations would become more powerful world conquerors than Alexander the Great and Napoleon. According to Liang, China urgently needed to accelerate industrial production through capitalist methods carefully regulated by the state. This was how it could withstand the unprecedented power of American capitalist imperialism.

‘China’s achievement’

After many calamities and tribulations, China has in fact fulfilled Liang’s dream of national pride and dignity — to the point where the US today fears the dominance of a Chinese corporation like Huawei (literally translated as “China’s achievement”).

Over the past three decades, Huawei has transformed itself from a small maker of telephone switches into the world’s largest supplier of telecommunications equipment. In recent months, it passed Apple to become the world’s second largest smartphone maker, behind Samsung Electronics; it produced what by a broad critical consensus were the best smartphones and laptops of 2018.

Huawei also leads in the revolutionary and strategically vital new technology of 5G, with its 80 000 research engineers and US$13-billion annual research and development budget.

The US has responded to Huawei’s global edge in the past year by presenting it as a Trojan horse for Chinese military interests, and urging its allies — Australia, Canada and the UK — to participate in a broad ban on the company. But Washington has yet to publicly offer any evidence of Huawei’s involvement in spying or cyberattacks.

The argument that Huawei’s founder is a former officer of the People’s Liberation Army, and therefore prone to help the Chinese government and military, becomes even less persuasive when one considers the close and gilded links between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley.

As The New York Times reported in 2013, “For years, the Pentagon has knocked on Silicon Valley’s door in search of programmers to work on its spying technologies.” The CIA funds a venture-capital entity that invests in dozens of companies whose products could be useful in spycraft. Moreover, the US government has surreptitiously used private companies, including Verizon Communications and AT&T, to collect data on American citizens as well as foreign nationals.

The China hawks are succeeding like never before in throttling Huawei. But such victories can only be dangerously counterproductive

Certainly, neutral observers of the US war on Huawei won’t be much impressed by the charges against Meng: that she misled American banks about a Huawei subsidiary that did business in Iran, inducing them to violate arbitrarily imposed US sanctions.

The Chinese suspicion that there is a concerted American campaign against Huawei should be bolstered by the fact that President Donald Trump blocked a bid from a Singapore-based chip company for American chip maker Qualcomm. As the highly secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the US clarified, Qualcomm, which is locked into competition with Huawei on 5G patents, could’ve been undermined by the deal.

Meng’s arrest is one more indication that under Trump, the China hawks — in the US congress, the justice department, the intelligence establishment — are succeeding like never before in throttling Huawei. But such victories can only be dangerously counterproductive.

During the anti-American boycott of 1905, Liang spoke fervently of the “sleeping lion” that had been awakened by the indignities inflicted on the Chinese by the US. Indeed, it was through such humiliations that anti-Westernism became a core component of Chinese nationalism, pushing Chinese leaders into irreversibly hard-line positions.

Today, the China hawks in the US seem to enjoy unrestricted licence. But let there be no doubt: they’re poking a lion that is wide awake and increasingly angry. — By Pankaj Mishra, (c) 2018 Bloomberg LP