5G Was Going to Unite the World—Instead It’s Tearing Us Apart

Tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade, human rights, the handling of Covid-19, and Chinese misinformation are escalating global divisions around the deployment of 5G. A growing number of countries are aligning with either a Western or a Chinese version of the tech. Even if 5G was meant to be a truly global communications standard, the technical plans reflect shifting national strengths and resulting tensions. The technical specifications for 5G are developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a coalition of standards organizations from the US, Europe, China, Japan, India, and South Korea. The group is putting the finishing touches on Version 16 of the 5G specs, which will add features that let devices hop among a wider range of wireless spectrum, offer high-precision positioning, vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, and more reliable, virtually instantaneous communications, crucial for industrial uses. Many companies have contributed to the drafting of 5G, but the standard reflects a shift from US and European tech to Chinese compared with 4G, the previous standard. An analysis of contributions to 3GPP specifications, published in August 2019 by IHS Markit, found that Chinese firms contributed approximately 59 percent of the standards, with Huawei accounting for most of those. The standards for 4G were led by European and American firms. “The US wrote 4G,” says Charles Clancy, vice president for intelligence programs at MITRE, a nonprofit that manages US research projects. “In the meantime, through government subsidies and cybertheft of competitors’ intellectual property, Huawei became the global leader while nobody was watching,” says Clancy. “They slowly took control of the standards groups, and China wrote 5G.”