Source: Global Times

Chinese telecom giant Huawei saw a substantial drop in both smartphone shipments and market share in China market in 2020, following a tough year of US government’s strangle on semiconductors supply, allowing US rival Apple to rise to fill up the void.

Under the US’ relentless assault, Huawei saw a drop in market share in China from 38.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019 to 25.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020, the only one of the top five smartphone makers in China whose share declined, an International Data Corp (IDC) report showed on Tuesday.

Industry experts said that Huawei’s rare market share decline reflected the US block on chips that affected the supply chain of the company’s high-end mobile series.

There were 86.4 million smartphones shipped in China in the fourth quarter of 2020, almost flat year-on-year, with Huawei being the only smartphone maker among the top five that did not grow. The others were Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Apple.

Although there could be many reasons for the changes in market share, Ma Jihua, a veteran industry analyst, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the US chip crackdown on the Chinese technology company created a supply chain crisis for Huawei and left space for others, especially high-end mobile producer Apple, to grab more share.

Apple was the only producer that achieved growth in China last year, with smartphone shipments up 10.1 percent, IDC reported.

Apple, which had a 34.7-percent market share growth in the fourth quarter in China, against Huawei’s 34.5 percent, also seized the top spot in the global market with a 23.4-percent share in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Apple released its 2021 fiscal first-quarter results on January 27, with revenue exceeding $100 billion for the first time and net profit of $28.755 billion, up 29 percent year-on-year. China was a particularly strong performer, with revenue from the greater China region at $21.313 billion, up 57 percent year-on-year.

“Apple lost market share to Huawei in 2019, and Huawei’s weakened competitiveness last year left it with only one viable competitor to challenge,” Liang Zhenpeng, senior industry analyst told the Global Times. Apple’s launch of a 5G mobile came later but also helped it to fill a gap as its major market embraced advanced internet connectivity.

However, Apple’s growth pace might be hard to sustain at an equivalent high level this year when other Chinese mobile producers such as Xiaomi and Oppo are also targeting the high-end smartphone market, experts said.

“Apple, as an important high-end mobile producer, will see unprecedented competition from a few Chinese brands,” said Ma.

Liu Bo, vice president of OPPO, gave a speech on Monday in which the company set higher targets for its growth in 2021, including the comprehensive upgrade of the company’s channels and partnership, media reports said.

Meanwhile, Huawei’s difficulties may be only temporary.

“Once Chinese 5-nanometer chips can be produced, the whole market will change,” said Ma, noting that he expected such chips could be out at the end of this year.

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Source: Caixin Global

The bad news keeps coming for sanction-hobbled Huawei.

IDC has just released its latest quarterly smartphone results and they show that the embattled telecom giant’s smartphone sales plunged by nearly half — or 42.4 per cent to be exact — in last year’s fourth quarter from a year earlier.

That makes Huawei the world’s fifth biggest brand for the period, a far cry from just two quarters earlier when it was at the top of the heap.

Huawei has been dogged by US sanctions for nearly two years now, as Washington aims to limit the company’s role in the worldwide development of state-of-the-art 5G smartphones and networking equipment.

First, the US banned American companies from selling components and software to Huawei. And last year it turned up the pressure by leaning on some of Huawei’s key non-American suppliers to abandon the company as well.

That has left Huawei with a limited supply of chips and other key components that have hurt its ability to make smartphones, forcing it to rely on stockpiles built up before the sanctions took effect.

Meantime, Huawei’s pain has been Apple and Xiaomi’s gain. The iPhone maker’s smartphone shipments surged 22.2 per cent year on year in the quarter, enough to lift it past Samsung for the smartphone crown, as it shipped 90.1 million iPhones — a record for a single vendor in a single quarter. And Xiaomi’s shipments rose by an even stronger 32 per cent, giving it 11.2 per cent of the global smartphone market.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter.

FILE PHOTO: US Army soldiers © REUTERS/Bryan Woolston

• When it comes to closing the gap that exists in civil-military relations in the US that contribute to the militarization of its foreign policy, the onus falls on American citizens, and not the US military, to accomplish this task.

A pair of recent articles have raised the question as to whether America is well-served by the all-volunteer military that has existed since the end of the Vietnam War. Rajan Menon, a political scientist from the City College of New York, writes in Foreign Policy that the forever wars currently waged by the US continue because they place too little burden on the public and politicians. In the same vein, Dennis Laich, a retired US Army major general with more than 35 years of service, writesin The Military Times that “America has been involved in endless wars for 20 years. And today, 330 million Americans lay claim to rights, liberties, and security that not a single one of them is obligated to protect and defend. The all-volunteer force has granted all Americans an exemption from this obligation.”

While I understand the sentiment behind these words, I strongly disagree with the underlying assumption. The US military does not protect the rights and liberties of the average American citizen. These rights and liberties are fought for and defended within the context of the daily lives of Americans inside our borders. The military does not guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial, or any other of the myriad of rights and privileges that have come to define the United States as a collective. In fact, the military, with few exceptions, has no roll in the domestic affairs of the American people. The task of defending American rights and privileges is the exclusive purview of the American civilian, who must do so daily lest these rights diminish and fade away.

What the military does provide is a barrier of external security which safeguards America and American interests abroad from foreign enemies. It is an important job, but it does not equate to protecting and defending the rights, liberties, and security I demand as an American citizen. Indeed, while the military (like every other public servant) takes an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, it is that very document which bars military involvement in the civil affairs of the nation. Thankfully, it appears that the current US military leadership shares this point of view. Let the military fight Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; I’ll take care of defending my rights on the home front, thank you very much.

A bigger issue confronted by both Rajan Menon and Dennis Laich is what Laich calls the “civil-military gap” that contributes to the militarization of US foreign policy and the lack of public accountability on the part of US presidents and members of Congress who, because of the existence of an all-volunteer military, no longer have to worry, as Menon puts it, about “mass demonstrations or electoral backlashes” which result in their being given “greater freedom to continue war for years.”

Rajan Menon and Dennis Laich both point out that what Menon calls “the uneven burden of protecting the United States” has created a military that is largely drawn from economically disenfranchised elements of American society and funded by borrowing trillions of dollars as opposed to directly passing the cost of the military and the wars it wages directly on to the American people. They both note that the combination of a ready pool of lower-class recruits and the debt-driven funding of the military places “virtually no demands on the public” and, as such, creates no impetus for the public therefore to hold their elected officials responsible for the endless wars America has been engaged in since the end of the Cold War.

Military’s job is to prevail on battlefield – not to pick the location of this battlefield

I would counter that the best solution to this problem is a better understanding of basic civics on the part of the American people, and not lowering the quality of the US military by diluting its professionalism with ill-trained conscripts. If you want to change foreign policy, that change is best accomplished on the front end, where the cost is measured in terms of air miles flown by diplomats engaged in the art of diplomacy, and not on the back end, where the price is measured in the lives of servicemembers sacrificed because of a lack of training. Teaching Americans to be better global citizens is a far more effective way to alter our foreign policy than making our military anything less than dominant in the field of battle.

The military’s job is to prevail on the battlefield. It does not get to pick the location of this battlefield, or the enemy that will be confronted there – that is the responsibility of the civilian leadership the American people elect to represent them in national office. These elected officials – not the military – make the policy that the military is called upon to implement. And since the military’s sole purpose is to win the battles it is tasked to fight, then I would argue that any measure undertaken to rectify the domestic political problem manifested in the so-called “civil-military gap” that dilutes the lethality and efficiency of the US military is a self-defeating proposition. This includes the kind of conscript military favored by both Laich and Menon.

There is no doubt that short-term conscripts are more than capable of handling many of the individual tasks associated with military service, especially the more menial ones normally affiliated with front-line combat service. This, however, does not mean that they do these tasks well, or are capable of repeating successful outcomes over time. This comes with the kind of repetition that takes place over time – the kind of time a two- or three-year period of conscripted service does not provide when it comes to learning the profession of arms.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the bestselling book, ‘Outliers’, has asserted that it takes about 10,000 hours of intense, prolonged, and concentrated practice before one can become exceptionally successful in a given field. Gladwell based his theory on the work of Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist perhaps best known for postulating that anyone could rise to the top of his or her chosen field through a combination of the proper training and will. Ericsson wasn’t sold on Gladwell’s 10,000 hour figure – he noted that in the field of classical music the best performers have put in some 25,000 hours of practice – deliberate, dedicated time spent solely on improving one’s skill.

‘I spent six years training how to defeat Russians’

One is the byproduct of his/her own experience, and as such their opinions are shaped by bias associated with these experiences. I enlisted in the US Army in 1979 as a volunteer. Five years later, having graduated from college and officer candidate school, I was commissioned in the US Marine Corps. I learned one of my first lessons in professionalism from a tactics instructor at the Basic School, a six-month finishing school for Marine lieutenants before they are shipped off to the real world of the Fleet Marine Force. We were driving on I-95, between Washington, DC and Quantico, through the kind of rolling, wooded hills that comprise the Northern Virginia landscape. The instructor, a captain, casually asked me what I saw when I looked at the scenery.

“It’s nice,” I said.

“You’re dead,” he replied. As went on to explain, I should never look at terrain from a civilian point of view. I should be examining fields of fire, routes of advance, defilade, enfilade, cover, concealment and the best places to plot pre-registered fires. If these weren’t the first things I thought of when I looked at the surrounding terrain, then I probably needed to choose a new line of work, because otherwise I’d be getting myself and the Marines I was privileged to lead killed. This way of thinking, the captain said, does not happen on its own, but rather is conditioned over hours of repetitive practice, until it becomes second nature to do these evaluations. Family vacations were never the same after that, but he was right – even today I look at terrain with a military eye as a matter of habit.

Terrain appreciation is but one of dozens of critical skills that a professional warrior must ingrain into his or her being as second nature. It requires a mindset totally dedicated to the military profession, something a conscript military, by definition, does not – and cannot – have.

I entered the military in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the US military establishment was making the difficult yet necessary transition from the conscript force that was so scarred by the Vietnam experience, to a professional military capable of prevailing on the battlefields of Europe against the Soviet Army.

I spent six years training how to defeat the Russians, including two-and-a-half years at 29 Palms, California, home of the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center. There, I spent countless hours perfecting the art of combined arms combat in a maneuver war environment. By the time I rotated out of 29 Palms, I had accumulated more than 10,000 hours of intense, highly focused training. I was an expert in my field (the provision of combat intelligence to a general support field artillery battalion). After three more years, accumulating thousands of more hours of training, I was given the opportunity to test my skills in an actual war – the 1991 Gulf War.

I was not alone. The 700,000-plus servicemembers who deployed to the Middle East in 1990-1991 to liberate Kuwait from Iraq were all “volunteers.” But they were also all professionals who, like me, had accumulated untold hours of focused training on doing their respective job. Very few of those deployed had been to war before – they, like me, were untested.

The result speaks for itself – the US-led coalition handily defeated a larger force of combat-hardened Iraqi conscripts, largely on the capability and professionalism of the all-volunteer force that existed at that time. It was not even close. I emerged from that experience convinced that the military force the US had assembled in the deserts of the Middle East could defeat any other military force in the world – bar none. The main reason why I believed so was that we had become that which Gladwell and Ericsson theorized about – experts whose expertise was drawn from years of dedicated, focused training on the art of war.

No conscript force would ever be able to match the professionalism of the US military circa 1990-91. And while I am no longer in the military, I would suspect that, if anything, the technological complexities of modern war have increased exponentially, making for even more intense training requirements so that this new technology could be seamlessly folded into existing doctrine, tactics, operations, and strategies. The bottom line is that the fundamentals of lethality, sustainability and survivability that govern if a military formation will survive on the battlefield are enhanced significantly with the kind of focused, long-term training a professional military can offer.

A conscript military will not, in and of itself, alter the current focus of US foreign policy objectives, which often lead to armed conflict. That will require a fundamental rethinking on the part of the American people about how we interact with the rest of the world. But it will increase the likelihood of defeat on the field of battle by the US military. If America were to revert to a conscript military, we would lose the edge that a professional military provides, with the difference quantifiable in terms of body bags coming home.

by Liu zhen Source: South China Morning Post

“China also learned from the Gulf War that the US had established its dominance and hegemony through military might. The US could beat you whenever they want to”

Monday marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, when American-led coalition forces invaded Iraq. The Gulf War sparked 30 years of chaos and turmoil in the once powerful Middle Eastern country but also served as a rude awakening for China’s military leaders.

With the technology and firepower on show during the conflict – precision bombing, satellite guidance, missile interception, air-to-surface strike to eliminate tanks, electronic warfare, one-way transparency on the battlefield, stealth bombers – the Gulf War was a “psychological nuclear attack” on China, observers say.

The event helped to kick start China’s military modernisation and led to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) narrowing the gap with the US military so much that it is now considered a “strategic threat”.

Desert Storm, which lasted six weeks, marked the dawn of a warfare revolution, showed the backwardness of the PLA at that time and sparked anxiety regarding national security,experts say.

“It showed China how a war should be fought and forced the Chinese military to skip the mechanised stage and jump straight to develop information technologies,” said Ni Lexiong, a Shanghai-based military expert.

“From military theories to the building of the army, to the weapons and equipment, to the relevant technologies, we realised it was all decades behind the Americans.”

Antony Wong Tong, a Macau-based military analyst, said old PLA doctrines like “People’s war” were proven outdated by the Gulf War, and showed that after June 4, 1989 – the date of the bloody massacre in Tiananmen Square – China had once again become an imaginary enemy of the US, which made the problem more imminent for Beijing.

“Since the 1990s the PLA has thoroughly switched to the path of professionalisation and modernisation,” he said.

The year 1991 saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and the military and political pressure on China dramatically increased. Aware of its own vulnerability and weakness, China adopted a “keeping a low profile and biding time” approach to diplomacy, while putting all of its effort into development.

In the aftershock of the Gulf War, then Chinese leader Jiang Zemin began to promote the idea that the PLA should focus on building “modern regional warfare capabilities under hi-tech conditions”, “complete the dual historical tasks of mechanisation and informationisation” and “achieve the modernisation of the army by leaps forward”, according to Tang Zhichao, who specialises in Middle East studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

According to Hong Kong-based military commentator Song Zhongping, China used the hi-tech American weapons it had seen in the war – like precision missiles, missile defence systems and stealth warplanes – as a guidebook for its development. Tactics like joint operations between different forces and the organisation and technologies needed to realise them were also given great attention.

Retired PLA major general Jin Yinan spoke of the impact the war had had in his memoir.

“At one point, we translated a lot of the US military’s operational regulations and military reports, and began to build the army by copying their models and standards.”

Under Jiang, the PLA slashed 700,000 troops in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping cut a further 300,000 and initiated massive restructuring and a reform of the command chain.

The military’s budget started rising fast in 1999 with double-digit growth for more than a decade, in line with the soaring Chinese economy. By 2019, China’s annual defence spending was the second-biggest in the world, reaching US$176 billion, compared to America’s US$732 billion. Beijing allocated a budget of US$178.6 billion for 2020.

The Chinese army last year announced the completion of the mechanisation of its Ground Force. But even before then the PLA was ahead of the US in some areas, like shipbuilding, land-based conventional missiles and integrated air defence systems, according to the Pentagon’s 2020 “China Military Power Report”.

The PLA Navy is the world’s second largest after the US by total displacement. It has about 350 ships and submarines, including more than 130 major surface combatants. The US Navy has 293 ships. Moreover, most of China’s best ships were built after 2010 so feature the latest equipment and technologies.

By comparison, in 1991, the PLA Navy was a near-shore defence force whose largest ship was a 3,600-tonne destroyer Type 051.

The PLA Air Force is now the third-largest in the world, with more than 2,500 aircraft and about 2,000 combat aircraft, most of which are third- and fourth-generation warplanes, comparable to Western air forces. China is only the second country in the world to have developed a fifth-generation stealth fighter, the J-20.

In 1991, the best planes in the PLA Air Force were the J-7 – developed from a 1950s’s MiG-21 – and the domestically developed J-8, both of which were second-generation.The US aircraft involved in the Gulf War were mostly fourth-generation F15s, F-16s and F/A-18s, while the military decided Lockheed Martin’s prototype Y-22 would become the world’s first fifth-generation stealth fighter – the F-22.

The PLA Rocket Force has more than 1,250 ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 500km (310 miles) to 5,500km, which the US almost did not have due to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Rocket Force has greatly upgraded and expanded its nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile inventory in the past 30 years and now leads the world in the deployment of hypersonic glide missiles with its DF-17.

“Chinese equipment may not be as good as the Americans in certain specifications, but at least it is of the same generation of development. There is no longer the generational gap there was in the 1990s,” Ni said.

The Gulf War played a very important role in stimulating the progress of China’s military modernisation, Tang said.

Although China’s state television did not broadcast live reports on Desert Storm, it was still closely watched.

“Like myself, the prediction of most military personnel in China at the beginning of the war was that the United States would repeat the Soviet Union’s failure in Afghanistan,”said Liu Dingping, an officer with the PLA Second Artillery Command (now the Rocket Force) wrote in a newspaper article at the time. “But … we were wrong.”

The US-led coalition flew more than 100,000 sorties and dropped 88,500 tonnes of bombs, which stripped Iraq of its defences. The fact it took the coalition just 42 days – including just 100 hours on the ground – to wipe out what was at the time the world’s fourth-largest army was telling, experts say.

“If it was us being attacked by the Americans at that time, the result might not have been any better,” said Ni, who was a 36-year-old military history researcher in 1991.

Many of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s soldiers were veterans of the Iran-Iraq War and as well as Chinese weapons – Type 69 tanks, Type 63 armoured personnel carriers and J-7 fighters – were armed with advanced Soviet T-72 tanks and MiG-25, MiG-29 fighters.

But the US had the world’s first operational stealth warplane – the F-117, and fourth-generation fighters, the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18, as the backbone of its air campaign. Moreover, the squadrons of reconnaissance, surveillance, electronic-warfare, aerial refuelling tanker aircraft were total strangers to the Chinese.

Wong said the PLA had never imagined that the coalition would be able to win with almost nothing but air power.

“It was as shocking as a psychological atomic bomb on the Chinese military, who still believed in Soviet-style tactics from the 1960s and 1970s,” he said.

Wang Yiwei, a professor of international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said the conflict reminded the Chinese of the rule of the jungle: “fall behind and you will be beaten”.

“China also learned from the Gulf War that the US had established its dominance and hegemony through military might. The US could beat you whenever they want to,” he said.

The PLA at that time also realised it had fallen behind its number one imaginary enemy – Taiwan – in terms of advanced technology and weaponry. The Taiwanese independence movement had been growing since then, and especially after the Strait Crises in 1995 and 1996, when the PLA stepped back when two US aircraft carrier strike groups intervened, Song said.

“So given the constant accumulation of external and internal demands, coupled with the model effect of the Gulf War, the PLA were deeply aware of the importance of strengthening its ability and improving its readiness for war,” he said.