Another Cold War can be avoided

Editor's Note: In a recent interview with Kyoto News Agency in Shenzhen, Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, talked about Sino-US relations, 5G and Huawei's development among other issues. Following are some of his remarks translated from a report on the interview by guancha.cn:

China and the United States will not enter a new Cold War, if the US stops closing itself, and China continues to open itself to the outside world wider and wider. A cold war can only happen when both countries choose to close themselves off. A cold war cannot happen when the two powers are open. The US needs China's market, and its economy will suffer heavily without China's market.

As long as China remains open, globalization will unlikely be a split process. Trade disputes between China and the US can be solved through negotiation. On this issue, China and Japan have done much better. The two neighbors have also encountered conflicts and disputes on some issues in recent years, but the Japanese government has always done a good job in separating politics from trade and the economy.

I am not concerned that the "entity list" adopted by the US poses a threat to the survival of Huawei, but I have some concerns about whether Huawei will remain an advanced company in three to five years. What makes the US so great is that its advanced culture, advanced system and strict property rights protection can attract talents from all over the world to innovate in the US. I am worried that after Huawei survives the current crisis, every one of us would think it can continue to be good, but this is impossible. Therefore, I firmly support the path of globalization rather than self-isolation.

China and the US will not be decoupled in science and technology just because of the US sanctions against Huawei. They will still be mutually interdependent. The US blocks Huawei, but other Chinese companies can still buy from the US, and sanctions against Huawei alone cannot change the trajectory of globalization.

In 5G, Huawei made development earlier and injected more investment, so we took the lead, but this is only temporary. We have surpassed US companies in certain areas, but we cannot surpass the US as a country. The influence of AI in the future will have a bigger impact than Steve Jobs' mobile internet, but such kind of innovation will not necessarily be done by Huawei.