Huawei Ban, Round Two? Why the US is Afraid of HarmonyOs
HarmonyOs will be the first real Chinese operating system capable of worrying the US, which until now has had the market in its grip with Apple, Microsoft and Google products. And immediately a bipartisan letter from two members of Congress appears asking Trump to pressure his allies to ban Huawei products
In May 2019, Donald Trump , in his first presidential term, started trade hostilities with China by banning the products of the Asian giant Huawei from the States and, consequently, its apps from the main virtual stores, starting with Apple and Google. Six years later, despite the significant impairment suffered by the USA, not only has Huawei not left the scene, but it is preparing to launch an operating system capable of shaking up an entire market, opening a telluric fault that runs from Cupertino to Mountain View, up to Redmond where Microsoft is based. That, in fact, is the star-spangled geography of iOS, Android and Windows software used by dozens and dozens of people around the world on fixed and portable devices for study, gaming and work (including, it should be emphasized, devices used in public administrations). HarmonyOS is on its way to becoming the first operating system made in China capable of dethroning the USA from a sector in which they have never had rivals. Until now.
HARMONYOS TERRORIZES THE USA
And how is the US taking it? Badly. In fact, very badly. The American problem, however, is that they have already exhausted the options on the table since 2019, banning Huawei products from the 50 states. This is why in the letter that two members of the US Congress – Republican John Moolenaar and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi – in a curiously transversal request, Trump is begged to pressure friendly countries not to adopt HarmonyOs.
The two politicians are respectively the chairman and a leading member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party , a committee within the House established in 2023 that in the very last period seems to have polarized its reports in an anti-Chinese key: "The United States – we read in the letter dripping with fears and suspicions – should carefully examine the architecture and source code of HarmonyOS and ensure that our allies and partners around the world are aware of the "governmental" control of Huawei and, consequently, of the Chinese Communist Party over HarmonyOS", the politicians say, also demonstrating that they have already drawn important conclusions even before having examined the software.
NOT JUST HUAWEI: CHINA IS INCREASINGLY SCARING THE USA
According to the bipartisan letter, the United States, faced with the threat posed by the commercialization of HarmonyOs, has only one goal: "to ensure that it does not become a globally distributed operating system, given its relevance to national security and geopolitical implications." The risk feared by the Democratic and Republican representatives is that "HarmonyOS may contain backdoors and vulnerabilities designed to facilitate espionage. Furthermore, in the context of mobile devices, the use of HarmonyOS will correspond to the use of Huawei's app store, giving the CCP veto power over the user's decisions to download a device and the ability to access sensitive code."
“US OPERATING SYSTEMS MUST REMAIN GLOBAL LEADERS”
Chairman Moolenaar later told the media : “HarmonyOS is developed and owned by Huawei, which is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, period. It gives Beijing control over the software installed on phones, cars and smart devices around the world. The United States must lead a global response: investigating its code, warning our allies and preventing it from being integrated into critical infrastructure and used for espionage purposes.”
Krishnamoorthi even went further: “We should not allow the Huawei wolf to enter our henhouse. Instead of reacting quickly once HarmonyOS is integrated into devices around the world, we should be proactive and ensure that American operating systems continue to be global leaders.” It is difficult not to classify such statements as ravings, but with Trump the anti-China group risks finding a strong supporter in the White House.
Huawei is not the only target of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party led by Moolenaar: in recent days, the committee's attention has been drawn to the record-breaking IPO (raised $4.6 billion) of the Chinese electric battery giant Catl, which the Pentagon earlier this year had labeled as a company in the pay of the Chinese military , and above all to the role in the operation of Bank of America and JPMorgan, guilty of having participated in the capital raising , "ignoring the government's warnings and putting the security of the United States at risk. Congress must strengthen the rules on outbound investments to prevent US capital from aiding our adversaries", they thunder on social media.
AND WHAT WILL TRUMP DO?
From this perspective, the fragile trade peace between Washington and Beijing in recent days is unlikely to last, even if Donald Trump, at least for now, prefers to listen to the hi-tech entrepreneurs (from Tim Cook to Elon Musk ) who have said and repeated that it is not possible to think of transferring the supply chains of multinationals from China to the States , both due to a question of higher costs and the lack of highly specialized manpower.
It now remains to be seen what the US president intends to do with Huawei: having already banned the Chinese giant's products six years ago, will he really put pressure on his allies and partners to do the same? Will he once again use tariffs as a club to make his requests difficult to refuse?
At the same time, it is increasingly likely that HarmonyOs could end up in the state computers of countries not aligned with Washington, starting with the BRICS – the grouping of emerging world economies that Trump certainly does not like , formed by Brazil, Russia, India and China with the addition of South Africa, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran and Indonesia – which has now come to represent 51% of the population and 40% of the world's GDP. A vast and ever-expanding virgin prairie hungry for technology, for Huawei and its HarmonyOs. Trump's latest ban has allowed Chinese Big Tech to become the number 1 rival of American software houses, a second round could allow it to grab a huge market share.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/ban-huawei-harmonyos/ on Sun, 25 May 2025 13:02:55 +0000.