Huawei research ‘advantage’ targeted with employee ban

The United States is going beyond hobbling Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei’s technology reach by adding the company to its trade blacklist – it is now aiming directly at Huawei’s research capability.

This week the influential New York-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE banned anyone employed by Huawei from peer reviewing research papers or serving as editors of its journals, although they may continue to sit on journal editorial boards.

The move by a major scientific and professional body with more than 422,000 members in 160 countries ostensibly prevents Huawei employees getting early sight of cutting-edge research papers from around the world before they appear in journals, removing a potential ‘first mover’ advantage.

IEEE publishes some 200 journals and magazines. Around 80 Huawei employees are believed to be IEEE members, according to a Chinese source.

On 15 May the US Department of Commerce added Huawei Technologies and its affiliates to a list of companies that require a licence before US technology can be sold or transferred abroad. Licences could be rejected if they are deemed to harm US ‘national interest’.

In a statement the following day, IEEE said that as a New York-registered non-profit organisation it had to discontinue using Huawei scientists as peer reviewers in order to comply with its “legal obligations under US laws”.

IEEE noted that US government export restrictions cover not just physical goods and software but also technical information, and pointed out that violations of the US ban carry significant penalties including fines or prison sentences.

The institute said in a more recent leaked memo that Huawei’s employees “cannot access materials submitted by other persons until after IEEE has accepted the material for publication”.

Access to first-hand research

An IEEE senior member in Hong Kong, Wong Kam Fai, who is associate dean of external affairs in the engineering faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong or CUHK, said: “The US government suspects that if Huawei employees have a chance to read these papers then there’s a chance they’ll steal the intellectual property in that paper.”

Other IEEE associate editors have been reminded not to distribute papers that they receive to employees of Huawei, said Wong, who is a professor of systems engineering and engineering management.

“All these papers that are submitted [to IEEE journals] are first-hand research, and perhaps IEEE’s action will prevent Huawei seeing the first-hand research that has not yet been published. It will not affect research collaborations, or the research itself.”

IEEE fellow Pascale Fung, director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told University World News: “Normally with IEEE we look for the best researchers in their field for review regardless of where they are from, but if Huawei employees are not allowed then we must avoid recruiting peer reviewers from Huawei.”

She believed the overall effect on research would be very limited. “Huawei people are active in certain areas, they are not working in all areas, and anyway we do not ask people from just one company to review,” she explained.

In Hong Kong for example, Huawei operates a big data laboratory: “So if a conference is on big data, we would normally ask one or two people from their lab, but we cannot do that anymore.”

‘Slippery slope’

CUHK’s Wong described IEEE as “over-worried”, but the professional organisation – one of the world’s largest – was acting within its own bylaws.

“Science and research should not be subject to politics at all. If I were them [IEEE], I would think about changing those bylaws.”

Additional scrutiny of Huawei from being on the US entity list would mean “less collaboration with US universities, on 5G for example, or on integrated circuit design and chip technology, which are part of the central debate between China and the US government”, Wong said. “It will mean that Huawei will have to come up with their own research.”

Huawei’s semiconductor arm HiSilicon has already launched a global hunt for doctoral students and PhD holders in a range of fields to work in major Chinese cities on research and development or R&D.

According to Huawei, it has spent at least 15% of its global revenue of around US$97 billion on R&D – ranked third globally in terms of amount invested in company R&D. It has some 60 large research centres all over the world including at many universities, and some US$300 million is spent each year on university funding and partnerships.

The universities of Princeton, Stanford, Ohio, Berkeley and Illinois have all said they are freezing or cutting back research ties with Huawei, which provided some US$10.6 million in grants and contracts to nine US university departments in 2012-18.

Other institutions are more closely vetting Chinese research partners to avoid falling foul of US laws.

Fung described the IEEE development as bad for academic independence. “There should not be this kind of interference in academic research. If IEEE was registered in another country, not the US, we would not be seeing this. No other government has interfered in this way.”

“You never know, next time the US will select this or that organisation or company – it’s a slippery slope,” she said. “It’s very regrettable.”

In an open letter to IEEE, Zhang Haixia, an IEEE senior member and professor in Peking University’s Institute of Microelectronics, said she was “shocked to hear that IEEE is involved in the US-Huawei ban”.

She added that she would quit the editorial boards of IEEE NANO, which covers nanotechnology research, and IEEE JMEMS, which specialises in microelectronics, until IEEE returns to “our common professional integrity”.

Zhang said she was not linked to Huawei. However, her comments reflected wider concern among academics in China about their research links with the US and possible other moves by IEEE and others from, for example, publishing articles – which are not currently banned by IEEE, or sponsoring meetings or conferences.

In the past IEEE has barred scientists in Iran, Libya, Sudan and Cuba from contributing to IEEE publications in response to US administration trade embargoes with those countries.

Huawei declined to comment.