Opinion | What Poland’s arrest of a Huawei executive says about China’s rise and who it can count on

Billy Huang says Poland is just the latest US ally to demonstrate its support of American policy on China. Meanwhile, the silence of countries expected to back China shows that it is fighting a lonely battle

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Published: 10:30am, 25 Jan 2019Updated: 7:03pm, 25 Jan 2019

On a business trip to Poland 10 years ago, friends there told me a joke over dinner: When the Solidarity movement against the communist government was in its prime in Poland in the early 1980s, it seemed inevitable that the Soviet Union would launch an invasion, supported by other Warsaw Pact countries. When martial law was declared, a worker went up to a soldier on a Warsaw street and asked him: “If the Russians and the East Germans were to invade at the same time, who would you shoot first?” “The Germans, of course,” the soldier replied. “Business before pleasure.”

The joke brought home to me Polish people’s deep-seated resentment of the Soviet Union. While the history of blood and tears goes back centuries, in the 1940s alone, Poland was as much devastated by the Soviet Union as by Nazi Germany. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the Red Army, which had promised to aid the Polish resistance, halted its offensive at a Warsaw suburb and left the Polish fighters to battle the Nazis alone. The Poles were decimated and up to 200,000 civilians were killed. Earlier, on March 5, 1940, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had ordered the mass execution at Katyn Forest of over 22,000 young Polish army officers who had been held captive by the Soviet Union.

Against this backdrop, Poland’s trajectory after the second world war is understandable. Poland was one of the first former communist countries to join Nato, with strong support from the United States, in 1999. Washington also backed Poland becoming one of the eight formerly communist regimes to join the European Union in 2004. As a close ally and partner of the US, Poland has repeatedly asked the US to establish a permanent military base there, which is now being dubbed “Fort Trump” in a nod to the US president’s support of it.

The strength of the US-Poland partnership was evident on January 11, when the Polish government announced the arrest of an employee of Chinese telecoms powerhouse Huawei, and a Polish citizen on espionage charges. The arrest has come at a time when Europe has increasingly become a battlefield between Washington and Beijing over Huawei.

Tensions have been high since December 1 when Canada arrested Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou at the request of the US. Warsaw did not bother to conceal its intention to please Washington by going after the Huawei executive. Poland’s intelligence spokesperson even tweeted the FBI, CIA and the US State Department when he released the identities of the two people arrested.

The reaction of various countries to the Huawei case shows that when China and the US jockey for power on the global stage, they are also testing their allies and how effectively they can work together. So far, the US and its allies have the upper hand and have collaborated seamlessly. Australia and New Zealand have banned the use of Huawei products in their 5G networks, Japan will drop Huawei from its government procurement list, the British government has expressed concerns and Germany has said it is considering a ban.