Red handed

The world is a better place for China’s emergence from behind the bamboo curtain where it hid for half a century. Economic and market reforms have led to the greatest reduction of poverty in world history. For some western manufacturers, competition from low-cost China has sometimes proved fatal, yet the overall economic effect has been beneficial, helping to deliver years of global growth without the inflation which once acted quickly to snuff out the boom times.

All this arouses a protectionist backlash, especially in America, but the American case against Huawei, the largest Chinese tech company, shows how many of these concerns are well-grounded. It demonstrates what ought not to be a surprise: that the Chinese Communist party does not operate within capitalist norms, and prefers a kind of piracy.

Charges levelled by US prosecutors give a detailed account of exactly how it behaved towards T-Mobile, its US client. Huawei is accused of smuggling one Chinese engineer into a T-Mobile lab in order to take pictures without permission and deploying another to steal a part of a handset-testing robot.