Now is not the time to be expanding research partnerships with Huawei GlobeDebate
Contributed to The Globe and MailMargaret McCuaig-Johnston, former executive vice-president of the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council, is a senior fellow at the China Institute at the University of Alberta and senior fellow at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.to be establishing a joint venture between the University of Laval in Quebec City and Huawei, and has called for private-sector participants to help evaluate the proposal.
However, the more important question is whether this is the time to be opening up new R&D collaboration with China. The Chinese telecommunications company Huawei has itself been in the spotlight recently, with prominent universities, including California’s Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cutting their R&D ties with the company, and Oxford University suspending research grants from Huawei.
Moreover, universities in the West, including Canada’s, have been alerted to the high number of joint collaborations between their professors and researchers in Chinese universities affiliated with its military.
Huawei, along with Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu, are among the top Chinese companies facilitating Beijing’s citizen surveillance system called the Social Credit System, which monitors people’s discussions on social media sites WeChat and Weibo. Citizens are losing the right to take a train or plane, and losing job promotions or spots in good schools for their children for saying things online that could be seen in any way critical of the Chinese government.
We are still awaiting the completion of the federal government’s review of Huawei as an equipment provider for our new 5G systems. Here it is not just “back doors” that are of concern, but also “bug doors,” meaning bugs that are installed to be activated at a later date, as well as complete shutdowns of the systems remotely.
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