There are thousands upon thousands of first and second generation Indians working in the US and UK tech industries. There are hardly any working in the Chinese tech industry.
Would you rather have a friend or an enemy spying on you? That appears to be the only options now that technology has thoroughly penetrated every day life.
Another point not mentioned enough is that societies with free press are far more likely to find and report exploits/backdoors. In a country like the US you see this a lot. There's many cases of security researchers reporting possible government funded exploits against their own government. In a place like China reporting something like that would probably mean you disappear
A better decision rationale would be; which of the two is more likely to use their spy-data against you?
And the answer to that is without doubt; your own local spy agency, not the one operating in another country.
I can see the facts of the Chinese government's authoritarianism, their persecution of their minority populations, and their international behavior just fine. In fact, they're so economically influential, that I find criticism of them is muted, and tolerance of their crap is high.
The question is to whom you would prefer to give this strategic advantage.
Now it looks really bad at us that we are offended from an Asian player after selling our tech to them for many years (well they didn’t had other choices either)
Obviously some 5G components aren’t critical. In that case maybe we must be more open.
I agree with you that they are on the same level of neutral-good as Finland/Sweden when it comes to international relations in general, though.
Corrupt leadership can destroy that trust and hamstring an economy for decades, even centuries.
I'm not sure what kind of timelines you have in mind, but the above is clear if you look at the past few hundred of years of European history. Wars, in particular, have been funded by honoured business commitments.
Sure, but when in crises, people heavily favor the short term gains of reneging or violating an agreement over the loss of potential future opportunities.
Also using your logic, Chinese companies appear to be quite a bit trustworthy since businesses and individuals continue to do repeat business in China, continue to open up new businesses in China/sign new contracts etc, etc, etc. As you can imagine, the real-world is a lot more complex.
>I'm not sure what kind of timelines you have in mind, but the above is clear if you look at the past few hundred of years of European history. Wars, in particular, have been funded by honoured business commitments.
I'm talking about things like the confiscation of wealth/property, as happened under Edward I or Phillip IV, or the Stuart period (where the crown sold off lands to fund wars, and did not honor agreements for borrowed funds) for e.g.
Certainly nation states with their constitutions and laws have helped stem this unilateral 'dictatorial' approach to governance, but I think that its a bit too early to say that nation states will always be rational actors. Certainly the US, for e.g. has violated a lot of treaties that were signed with the native americans.
Which Nokia timeline are you talking about? The current Nokia HMD which outsources to China and was found to have Chinese botnet in them ?
Nokia had accidentally enabled an option intended for phones sold in China with a China Telecom contract. To verify that they were eligible for use with the contract, the phones would connect to China Telecom servers on first use. For the phones that had that option incorrectly enabled, the request failed (because they weren't in China Telecom's database) and was retried relatively frequently. Based on this behavior, the initial report assumed the worst, but in the end it was misconfigured telemetry.
You can call it spyware if you want, but no botnet was involved.
In this case, Nokia likely won't reintroduce an obfuscated version of the leak to evade detection, because it wasn't intentional. On the other hand, it's certainly possible they'll configure a phone for the wrong carrier again, since the configuration process apparently involves passing a bunch of carrier-specific feature flags at build time.