Oh No, I Betrayed America
My journey to a Huawei watch
I didn’t intend to betray America today, but sometimes fate takes us in surprising directions.
Huawei, if you haven’t heard of it, is a Chinese telecommunications manufacturer. For a certain type of U.S. national security discourse, Huawei exists only in relation to the priorities of the U.S. government, which is how you get articles in Foreign Affairs subtitled “America Must Do More to Compete With Huawei” written by a mid-senior Biden administration figure:
Neuberger’s article hits a number of familiar tropes, especially how commercial superiority led Huawei to gain market share in sensitive sectors of the United States:
by 2012, Huawei telecom gear had been deployed across rural America, covering the bases that house U.S. nuclear weapons. This effectively provided the Chinese government with constant surveillance of the United States’ most sensitive capabilities and military operations. Huawei may not have been raking in profits from this venture, but for Beijing it was an intelligence coup.
The stakes of Huawei’s rise are held to be enormous:
China will extend its lead in 5G into the transition to 6G, cementing the country’s authority over worldwide telecommunications—and putting it in a position to compromise the security of the U.S. and allied military and intelligence operations that rely on these global networks.
The prescription is clear: a huge dose of industrial policy—for the Trump administration can pick up the tools the Biden administration was laying down:
The way to accomplish this is with incentives for technology innovation and joint financing for countries choosing between Chinese and non-Chinese technologies. The Trump administration should begin by making better use of the ten-year, $1.5 billion grant program established by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act.
Ironically, U.S. manufacturing has been so hollowed out that most of the benefits of a counter-Huawei effort would go to Nokia and Ericsson, which are European firms and the only serious competitor to Huawei.
If you’re a foreign policy aficionado, the previous few paragraphs serve pretty much as a recap of familiar ground. If you’re just now tuning in to the demise of U.S.-led globalization, it may be a shock. If you don’t live in the United States, it’s probably no surprise.
The China challenge isn't what American policymakers think it is. It's not primarily about security threats or unfair trade practices—it's about Chinese companies making better products for less money, and winning hearts and minds in the process.
Something in the difference between how the world “out here” works and how D.C. discourses portray it as working produces serious cognitive dissonance. Huawei isn’t some nefarious James Bond-villain style enterprise. Well, okay, maybe it is. Imagine if SPECTRE not only produced secret undersea volcano lairs also made really great tablets at an affordable price. (Or, to put it in classic terms: “Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.”) And imagine if they were a small—but rising—player in consumer electronics.
Americans aren’t noticing this because Huawei, along with a few other major Chinese firms, is banned from the U.S. market.
I want to be clear, because everyone on the Internet is illiterate: I’m not asserting right now that the Huawei ban as a good or bad thing. I am simply trying to point out that if you live in the United States and assume that you have a good vantage point on global consumer trends because you live in a rich country, you are dead wrong. Americans live in an increasingly walled-off market that is diverging from the trends and market shares of the rest of the world.
In particular, the United States is now insulated from Chinese goods, a gap that’s noticeable in cars and smart devices. (I’m leaving out telecoms infrastructure, the sort of thing that wonks like Neuberger notice, because I’m guessing most of us don’t order telecoms equipment often.)
The gap didn’t used to be so big. In 2015, for instance, China had no carmakers in the global top 10 and only one in the global top 15. In 2023, there were three PRC automakers in the global top 15, but only one in the top 10. Last year, there were four in the top 15 and two in the top 10 (with a third just a few units out of tenth place). In the United States, PRC car makers had a share of … zero percent.
There’s a smaller gap in smartphone makers, where Apple and Samsung dominate globally and in the USA, but once you look at the next manufacturers after the leaders you notice that names like Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, and Huawei together constitute a sizable global share. And, yes, those are all Chinese brands.
Five or especially ten years ago, you used to be able to look at Chinese export statistics and dismiss them as exaggerated. For one thing, global trade statistics didn’t capture that the bulk of value of an iPhone, for instance, went to companies outside of China even though stats attributed the whole value of the phone to China (for a version of this observation that will leave you confused and frustrated, see this CFR explainer). But if you go to not-America, and especially not-Global North, you will really quickly notice that Chinese brands now play a huge role. China isn’t just the workshop of the world: it’s increasingly a home to major brands.
(What’s ironic is that China is the world’s largest exporter but on a per-capita basis it’s almost exactly average as an exporter—the changes that are whipsawing markets around the world represent the spillover effects from the changes in China’s domestic markets.)
I’m going through this in detail because I want to offer a more bottom-up perspective on China’s role in global markets. Instead of the threat-centric narrative of Neuberger and D.C.-centric cognoscenti, I want you to think about the threat as arising to some degree as the spillover of China’s domestic consumer market spurring the development of highly competitive firms that make low-cost and good-enough products. That’s not the entire story—clearly, state-backed financing and other manipulations have helped these infant industries get past the toddling stage rapidly—but it is a larger part of the story than people want to admit.
And now we get to the part where I betray America.
I was walking through Doha Festival City Mall for an entirely different purpose when I saw a familiar store.
Natural wood, smooth lighting, well-designed products on tables … ah, the lines of an Apple Store. Except that there’s no Apple Stores in Doha. This was a Huawei store.
I had to go in. As a scholar of global orders, I needed to see what the competition was up to.
So the competition is up to some really nice things in the consumer electronics space, it turns out. Also, they were having a sale. And I’ve been a little annoyed at my Apple Watch for a couple of months because it’s inconsistent about showing me the damn time when I flip my wrist—the one thing I really need a watch to do. But a new Apple Watch would cost several hundred dollars, and I can’t justify that.
With the discounts, a Huawei watch cost well under two hundred US dollars. And, frankly, it looks better.
So I betrayed America. Reader, I bought one.
The watch does not feel like a $200 smartwatch. It feels much better. There were hiccups—I couldn’t install the Huawei app if I said I lived in the United States, so I signed up as a Qatari resident—but these were minor. And although in the past I’ve found Chinese-branded electronics a little clunky or not-quite-finished, this one approached (but not quite met) Apple standards. For a lot less.
I felt kind of weird about this. Not going to lie. I didn’t give the watch access to everything it asked for on my iPhone. But since the Chinese government already has my OPM file and probably a lot more besides (I worked in the House during Salt Typhoon!), it’s not like I was risking a lot.
The China challenge is much bigger than alarmists understand. It’s not just about espionage or market share. It’s about the United States and the West more broadly losing preeminence and Chinese firms becoming reliable parts of life.
The tools discussed by folks like Neuberger always seem to be like a particular kind of DC bullshit: if we pull on these policy levers, I’m sure the market will come up with a real solution. Maybe some tax breaks or incentives can tip the balance between governments buying Huawei or Nokia. I won’t pretend to understand that without a lot of additional research. However, I can say that if U.S. policymakers think that the challenge Huawei poses to the United States only relates to the espionage potential of telecoms infrastructure, then a) they are forgetting that the rest of the world also views U.S.-backed companies as threatening on this score and b) they are missing out what it means to live in a world where Chinese firms keep racking up the soft-power wins for Beijing.
For instance, not a hundred meters (4.97 chains, in imperial units) away from the Huawei Store there was a display for Chery’s Tiggo cars:
(Chery, as you know, is a larger automaker by volume than BMW.)
Chery specializes in making affordable, mass-market cars that look nice. (The entry-level Chery retails in Qatar for about $15,000 USD—try finding a new car of any kind in the United States for $15,000.) The video installation—which was only in English, because globalization is not a unidirectional process—was going through a sophisticated pitch designed to win over nervous buyers (“yes, we have lots of spare parts!”). The pitchman was wearing a thobe with a baseball cap, a nontraditional piece of headgear but one that does indeed denote “casual authenticity” in the Gulf of Arabia as much as in the Gulf of America. This is what smart power looks like—and it’s not even directed by some apparatchiks in the Chinese Communist Party mapping out a hundred-year strategy; it’s a normal advertising strategy pursued by a commercial firm.
Soft power gets built brick by brick, pitch by pitch.
When I last lived in Doha, more than a decade ago (not much more), Chinese goods were everywhere—but they were way down the value chain. I think there were Xiaomi phones, but mostly “Chinese-made” still meant cheap plates and cooking wear. Rarely, I saw a Great Wall knockoff Toyota truck.
Now, Chinese-made is the default for everything. Even in the eleven months since I arrived, the car brand Jetour has gone from a new arrival to the second (and maybe soon the first) most popular brand in the country. And that’s not counting Chery, MG, Mingzhi, BYD, Geely, Great Wall, BAIC, SAIC, and JAC—or, for instance, the Shacman heavy equipment I see everywhere.
The remarkable thing is the degree to which, as I’ve suggested above, this is not about geopolitics—but just about value for money. Again, I’m not dismissing that Chinese state interventions are keeping prices artificially low, or that there might be other forms of sharp commercial practices at work. But do you really think that’s all there is to it? And do you really think that the United States can just work a li’l harder and recover the leading position in consumer brands? And even if you do think that, do you think the Trump administration gives a damn—or could implement the policies necessary to achieve their goals?
Incidentally, in the meantime, the United States is lighting its universities—pillars of soft power—on fire.
Often, I find myself wondering if anyone in Washington knows what time it is. Even if the United States weren’t going through some — ah — difficulties at home, it would face a major set of challenges in retooling to compete with China. U.S. domestic problems and entanglements elsewhere make it unlikely that the United States can compete. But the fact that the policy debate seems to lag developments on the ground by five or more years compounds all of these difficulties.