- April 2017: A director of Chinese tech giant Huawei personally escorted famed Shanghai-born physicist Zhang Shoucheng from the latter’s hotel in Shenzhen. Jackson & Wood Professor of Physics at Stanford University, Zhang was in town to attend an IT summit.
- Sept. 2018: Prof. Zhang receives a European physics award, one of his many honors. His work in quantum physics is expected to revolutionize the global semiconductor industry. Yang Zhenning, the first Chinese scientist to receive the Nobel Physics Prize (1957), had predicted that Zhang would be the next one.
- Dec. 1, 2018: Prof. Zhang and Meng Wanzhou are expected to attend a dinner in Argentina, where the G20 summit is being held.
- Dec. 1, 2018: On her way there, Meng is arrested in transit by the Canadian government.
- Dec. 1, 2018: Prof. Zhang falls to his death from a building in the US, allegedly a suicide. Said to be suffering from depression, he was 55.
- Dec. 1, 2018: A nighttime fire breaks out at a factory of Holland’s ASML, the world’s leading manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology. EUV is crucial to the production of the next generation of semi-conductors, which US and Chinese tech firms as well as Korea’s Samsung are competing to be first to bring to market. Leading Chinese semiconductor producer SMIC is known to have ordered EUV technology worth US$120 million from ASML, for scheduled delivery early in 2019. After the fire, ASML announced that it expected delays in shipments of its products, notably early 2019.
Prof. Zhang was also a venture capitalist. He was a founding partner of a Silicon Valley-based fund investing primarily in early-stage technologies. Danhua Capital, also known as Digital Horizon Capital, holds shares in Silicon’s Valley’s start-ups who work on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and drones. Danhua is backed by Zhongguancun Development Group, a state-owned entity funded by the Beijing municipal government. The company has come under scrutiny of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which suspects (pdf) that its purpose is to pilfer critical U.S. know how and to transfer it to China.
 |
| The next year, in collaboration with Dung-Hai Lee at IBM, and Kivelson, Zhang applied this field theoretic approach to make a host of predictions concerning the global properties of quantum Hall systems, including the prediction that they should act as insulators and as metals under certain conditions. These and several other predictions were confirmed experimentally soon after. |
Zhang’s family says that his death had nothing to do with U.S.-China tensions.
The U.S. spy services and military do not like Huawei. They can no longer easily hack the equipment it sells. Convincing Cisco or some other U.S. company to leave back doors in their equipment is quite simple. One can always threaten the management or board of these companies with some tax investigation or over other shady activities. That is not so easy when the company is hosted in China. It requires the NSA and others to use more expensive efforts to reach their aim:
The National Security Agency breached Huawei servers years ago in an effort to investigate its operations and its ties to Chinese security agencies and the military, and to create back doors so the National Security Agency could roam in networks around the globe wherever Huawei equipment was used.
The U.S. is lobbying various countries not to use Huawei equipment. It claims that the Chinese government could use it for spying. That thought was obviously born when the U.S. spies looked at what they are doing themselves. Australia, New Zealand and Japan already agreed to keep Huawei out. Today the EU tech commissioner Andrus Ansip also warned of using Huawei. Ansip was previously the prime minister of the U.S. protectorate of Estonia. He is known to be a U.S. mole and is not taken too seriously:
Germany, meanwhile, said it opposed excluding any manufacturers from the planned construction of 5G mobile networks.
Meng Wanzhou, the arrested Huawei CFO, will have her bail hearing in Canada today. It is likely that she will fight her extradition to the United States. Staying in full compliance with U.S. sanctions is difficult and Huawei may indeed have not always done so. Then again – U.S. allegations of sanction violations can always be made up from hot air.
http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=110229http://dia-kosmos.blogspot.gr/
Comments