Imagine a card game with the object of getting the best hand. Three communal cards are placed on a table face up. China and U.S. each hold their own cards which they don't show each other.
Now imagine that China, the U.S., and a set of international researchers acting in good faith all interact to decide which communal cards are placed on the table face up.
The researchers can give whatever constraints they want-- maybe they want all face cards, or all the same number or suit. The U.S. and China can "play along" while at the same time making choices within that set of the researcher's constraints to maximize the chance that they have the winning hand.
U.S. and China can even guide the researchers away from one set of constraints to a different set if it improves their odds of winning.
So if U.S. gets to guide the constraints exclusively they greatly increase their chances of winning.
If you believe this (or a variation of this idea) then it's reasonable to consider the possibility that China is using, or could possibly use, economics as a weapon.
Today:
US GDP per capita: $60,000
Japan: $38,000
If China does everything right, somehow avoids any recessions or depressions, sees no major consequences from dictator Xi, magically stops accumulating debt at a torrid pace - in about 20 years they'll finally catch up to the US economy in size.
Given their population base, maybe it is inevitable; it won't be easy however. The US has been a comparatively very well oiled economic juggernaut for 150 years, and it's still rolling, commonly outpacing far smaller economies in growth. No country in world history has put together an economic stretch like the US has since the Civil War. China has a lot to prove about being able to manage something like that, especially under a power hungry dictatorship and utilizing a command & control tilted model. Filling in economic slack is the easiest part of growing an economy, that's where all the talking heads got Japan so wrong. Today all the talking heads are extrapolating China's easy fill-in-the-slack growth forward perpetually. They're going to be wrong again, the question is to what degree.
I think this should absolutely be a concern for US national security. But I also think there's something they're not telling us here. A lot of this sounds like the US government may already have its own backdoors in Qualcomm modems, and they don't want to give that up.
Whether that's real or not, the #1 concern is still that China would be able to backdoor any wireless equipment in the US from factory.
I don't see any reason why that shouldn't be taken seriously, especially when China requires by law backdoors in Chinese products and services.
> The US government worries that 90% of the modems will be produced by China (Broadcom/Qualcomm + Huawei + ZTE).