It is important to stay on top of the trade war news, but picking sides is an egregious mistake

I have spent the last month procrastinating on a Huawei column. To me, it felt like breaking up with a significant other because it is a terrible experience but one that is necessary. Being a tech reporter and not commenting on Huawei is like being a culture writer and ignoring Keanu Reeves.

The reason I had been so reluctant to write my opinions about Huawei is because the entire discussion has been poisoned by nationalism.

This is problematic for me because I despise nationalism. I think it is a common thread in most wars, it allows people to make racial proclamations that are almost always wrong and it creates emotional stubbornness that is quite ugly.

Then, I realised, that is the column.

One of the first learnings any immigrant will experience is the realisation that every person thinks their home country is the best in the world. This is why debates over food, culture or national preferences are so pointless. Truly being stuck in a nationalistic mindset is a fantastic way to miss out on great food, excellent conversations and new friends.

When this mindset is transferred to a telco brand caught in the middle of a bilateral trade war, it results in a truly toxic conversation.

I am an American, which means that if I wrote an anti-Huawei column it would immediately be picked apart as another bullet fired to defend my team.

But the thing is, I don’t care about Huawei, I think both Washington and Beijing are acting like spoiled children in the trade war and the only good thing that has come out of the Huawei mess is the sliced Apple logo metaphor (because it’s clever).

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If Huawei navigates the global turmoil and supplies the world’s 5G, then great. If they collapse because they can’t survive without the American market, then so be it.

Huawei is not a friend, colleague or even local small business, so why do we care about their success or failure (except for the job stability of the average employee). Huawei is a gigantic corporation, not some plucky startup trying to take on giants. They are the giant.

And yet, people either root for them — or wish them ill — as if their success actually makes a difference in our lives.

This is because Huawei has done a brilliant job of leveraging the victimhood narrative to build its brand. The clear winner of the trade war has been Brand Huawei (only the c-suite actually knows if this transfers to Company Huawei).

The result is that the media now covers media “Apple-style”…aka no matter how minor the update, Huawei will receive coverage. This is the dream of any public relations team, even if sometimes the news is not positive.

Because of this, Huawei has become the substitute for all things trade war. When people talk about Huawei, they aren’t really talking about the company, they are talking about China.

Most arguments fail to acknowledge that Huawei could dominate 5G for the next decade, while China struggles to recover from the trade war. Or, Huawei could collapse in financial ruin but China could skyrocket blast the US and become the next global hegemon.

Unfortunately, neither of these narratives fit the nationalism that drives the discussion around Huawei. One good example is the impending launch of HongMeng (Huawei’s new operating system).

People were absolutely certain this thing would be a TOTAL FAILURE or RESOUNDING SUCCESS. Anybody making these all-bold predictions have no clue what they were talking about. Only the people personally involved in making the operating system have any ability to predict if it will work or not — and even then they are just making an educated guess.

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But in our desire to defend or destroy a gigantic corporation, absolute certainty is the only way to approach the subject.

I guess the hope of this column is to remind people to continue to watch the trade war, stay informed and make decisions accordingly. But, don’t pick sides.

Try to remember that both China and the US are great-but-extremely-flawed nations. A person making decisions out of nationalistic tendencies is going to make zero impact on the actual outcome of the war, and in doing so is going to close themselves off to regular folks who don’t care about Apple, soybeans, Huawei or rare earth metals.

It’s okay to be patriotic, but nationalism leads to wars and it is up to the individual to act as a saucer and cool off the boiling tea.

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